Creativity + Analytics: Bridging the Divide
Consumer goods manufacturers have embraced digital technology as a way to build closer relationships with consumers and shoppers. This has opened up a wide array of opportunities to better target advertising and promotions. But all too often there remains a divide that prevents them from fully unlocking the potential of their significant investments in digital.
To unlock the full opportunity, consumer packaged goods (CPG) manufacturers need to bridge the divide between creativity and analytics. Creativity has been hard to quantify, other than through upfront insights to shape brand campaigns or testing to assess the emotional connection with consumers. Results have also been measurable only after long lag times. Analytics has been the province more of promotions versus branding, other than crude mix modelling. This is changing, as leading CPG manufacturers embrace three pragmatic ways to catalyze a more agile approach that better fuses creativity and analytics:
1 Offer Ads
Today, CPG manufacturers align advertising and promotions by coordinating the calendar for promotional events with their advertising campaigns so flights of ads drive traffic to stores when promotional events are running at the store. Digital allows a more integrated approach where offers are embedded in targeted ads for a particular retailer’s shoppers, where the advertising is optimized with a test and learn model to drive up ROI. This can result in a 2x to 3x increase in the effectiveness from the paid media spend, while enhancing trading value with key retail partners. The advertising inventory need not be inventory on a retailer’s site. It can be optimized across search and display across a broad set of media. Optimization can extend beyond targeting to include the right pairing of content with offers and the right call to action to optimize response and impact on brand health.
2 Mining Social Sentiment
Social listening provides an opportunity to mine insights to inform business decision-making with faster response times. One high value use case for social listening is to drive test and learn for the optimization of content, whether promotional displays, packaging, coupons or circulars. Sources of data for social listening can include structured data like ratings and reviews, as well as unstructured data like Twitter, Facebook or Instagram. This creates a new, fertile ground for brands to collaborate with retailers to tailor programs for specific consumer and shopper segments, occasions, and store formats. One brand manufacturer enjoyed more than a 10x improvement in the weekly velocity for a new product launched after incorporating insights from social listening.
3 Next Best Content
CPG manufactures can apply similar test and learn principles, working with a growing set of technology-enabled vendors, to optimize content for e-commerce and web-to-store conversion. Analytics can be used to optimize content for the right assortment, product content or offers to drive conversion. Brands can also optimize the insertion of content over multiple exposures across owned and paid media assets based on machine learning.
Is your organization ready to embrace agile marketing to better fuse creativity and analytics?
To unlock the full opportunity, consumer packaged goods (CPG) manufacturers need to bridge the divide between creativity and analytics. Creativity has been hard to quantify, other than through upfront insights to shape brand campaigns or testing to assess the emotional connection with consumers. Results have also been measurable only after long lag times. Analytics has been the province more of promotions versus branding, other than crude mix modelling. This is changing, as leading CPG manufacturers embrace three pragmatic ways to catalyze a more agile approach that better fuses creativity and analytics:
1 Offer Ads
Today, CPG manufacturers align advertising and promotions by coordinating the calendar for promotional events with their advertising campaigns so flights of ads drive traffic to stores when promotional events are running at the store. Digital allows a more integrated approach where offers are embedded in targeted ads for a particular retailer’s shoppers, where the advertising is optimized with a test and learn model to drive up ROI. This can result in a 2x to 3x increase in the effectiveness from the paid media spend, while enhancing trading value with key retail partners. The advertising inventory need not be inventory on a retailer’s site. It can be optimized across search and display across a broad set of media. Optimization can extend beyond targeting to include the right pairing of content with offers and the right call to action to optimize response and impact on brand health.
2 Mining Social Sentiment
Social listening provides an opportunity to mine insights to inform business decision-making with faster response times. One high value use case for social listening is to drive test and learn for the optimization of content, whether promotional displays, packaging, coupons or circulars. Sources of data for social listening can include structured data like ratings and reviews, as well as unstructured data like Twitter, Facebook or Instagram. This creates a new, fertile ground for brands to collaborate with retailers to tailor programs for specific consumer and shopper segments, occasions, and store formats. One brand manufacturer enjoyed more than a 10x improvement in the weekly velocity for a new product launched after incorporating insights from social listening.
3 Next Best Content
CPG manufactures can apply similar test and learn principles, working with a growing set of technology-enabled vendors, to optimize content for e-commerce and web-to-store conversion. Analytics can be used to optimize content for the right assortment, product content or offers to drive conversion. Brands can also optimize the insertion of content over multiple exposures across owned and paid media assets based on machine learning.
Is your organization ready to embrace agile marketing to better fuse creativity and analytics?