Innovation project by MediaMarktSaturn and Retresco honoured as best technology solution in retail

The EHI Retail Institute honours MediaMarktSaturn and Retresco with several awards for their joint innovation project for the automated creation of product descriptions: While Retresco receives the Top Supplier Retail Award, MediaMarktSaturn wins the prestigious reta award. The award recognises the use of Retresco’s AI-based automation solution, which MediaMarktSaturn has used to automate the creation of more than 500,000 product descriptions for the online stores of MediaMarkt and Saturn in Germany.  

At the Retail Technology Awards Europe (reta) 2021, the EHI Retail Institute honoured Retresco as Top Supplier Retail in the Best Enterprise Solution category, while MediaMarktSaturn received the prestigious reta award in the new Best AI and Robotics Application category. The international jury was convinced by the practical use of Retresco’s automated text generation software, which enables MediaMarktSaturn to create several hundred thousand product descriptions in the highest quality and in the shortest possible time in a scalable and automated manner.  

Retresco’s intelligent software-as-a-service solution for natural language generation (NLG) automatically creates texts from technical product attributes. The MediaMarkt and Saturn online stores have more than 350,000 products. Several thousand new products are listed each week, with a major challenge being that not every manufacturer provides detailed product descriptions for their products. By using Retresco’s automation solution, MediaMarktSaturn has already automatically created more than 500,000 unique product descriptions in around 400 product categories which the retailer makes available on the respective product pages in its online stores.  

The solution fundamentally optimises content processes at MediaMarktSaturn. The scalable creation of product descriptions is now efficiently managed by a small team of experts at MediaMarktSaturn based on Retresco’s automation solution. The company thus orchestrates the entire content process itself – from strategic control to operational design and generation of content.  

‘The dynamics of digitisation, increasing competitive pressure and growing customer demands pose major challenges for companies in the retail sector. This makes the use of innovative technologies such as automatic text generation, which increase operational efficiency and enable competitive and sustainable business, all the more relevant’, comments Johannes Sommer, CEO of Retresco. ‘By using Retresco’s automation solution, MediaMarktSaturn is taking an innovative step forward and assuming a pioneering role for the future.’  

Christian Brandl, Head of Master Data & Content Management at MediaMarktSaturn, added: ‘The use of AI and machine learning enables us to establish scalable processes and continuously improve the customer journey of our customers. Retresco’s NLG solution allows us to efficiently describe our assortments, ensures that descriptions are constantly up to date and ultimately contributes to a more consistent customer experience at our digital touchpoints.’

With this year’s reta awards, the EHI Retail Institute, a retail research institute based in Cologne, Germany, is honouring companies with the best ideas for future-oriented technologies in retail for the 14th year in a row. The winning companies will present their ideas on March 15 beginning at 2 p.m. at the EHI Innovation Days, powered by EuroCIS.