Some marketers just want the comfort of knowing they can access and audit their log-level data when they want to.
Most of them never dig in, though, because crunching the numbers is a highly complex process.
But Molson Coors media executive Brad Feinberg and his team make a point of regularly looking at log files from their exchange partners.
Molson Coors now handles the majority of its programmatic media buying in-house and maintains direct contracts with its technology partners, said Feinberg, who first joined MillerCoors more than 13 years ago, in 2009, as a senior media manager and now serves as North America VP of media and consumer engagement at Molson Coors. (Molson Coors acquired MillerCoors in 2016.)
Still, Feinberg wouldn’t describe the Molson Coors media setup as fully in-house.
Although Molson Coors hired a bunch of people who can manage programmatic – they sit on what the company calls its precision and digital marketing team – there’s a lot more to in-housing than media execution and getting hands on keyboards, Feinberg said.
“We’re bringing more capabilities in-house, but we’re trying to be strategic about it,” he said. “That means not just looking at this from a programmatic standpoint, but taking a holistic approach so that we’re modernizing our marketing to prepare us for the future.”
Marketing mixology
In practice, “taking a holistic approach” involves undergoing what Feinberg referred to as “a data transformation.”
Collecting first-party data is a challenge for most beer, beverage and CPG brands. Even though they’re big ad spenders, these businesses historically lack first-party relationships with their customers, who purchase in stores.
Molson Coors has gotten creative with its first-party data collection, including selling merchandise and running sweepstakes (anyone want to win a dive-bar-inspired patio set?). But for Molson Coors, marketing analytics still means doing more with less.
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Earlier this year, Media.Monks and Molson Coors began a project to improve the company’s media analytics and bring more data sources into its multi-touch attribution models, including data from the large social platforms. (The two first started working together in 2021, when Molson Coors began in-housing more of its digital media.)
There are three main components of a successful data transformation, Feinberg said. The first is data acquisition and enrichment, followed by data activation, then optimization, all of which needs to be underpinned by data governance principles.
And it doesn’t always mean whittling down the vendor roster. One thing Media.Monks worked on with Molson Coors was to select and onboard a customer data platform (Molson Coors uses BlueConic) and ingest more data (programmatic, TV, purchase-level data, audio and social media).
From there, it became about “exercising our data muscle,” Feinberg said.
“Over a rolling three-month period, all of this allows us to understand what’s performing best and make changes if creative or media isn’t performing well,” he said. “Then we marry that with traditional econometric marketing modeling to make sure we’re also driving longer-term brand growth.”
Homebrewed
When Feinberg says “we,” he means an internal team that’s purposely structured to create “a closed-loop department.”
Feinberg’s team includes a cross-functional group with backgrounds in data collection and enrichment – “they’re really good at looking under the hood,” he said – as well as people who understand activation, data optimization and marketing analytics.
“We want to know what’s working and what isn’t in as near real time as we can so our marketing is working as effectively as possible,” Feinberg said. “We like digging into the details.”
Long pour
But digging into the details isn’t necessarily everyone’s mug of beer, and not every brand has the tolerance. Embarking on an in-housing project or any type of transformation requires an ongoing investment of time and money.
“There was a point a few years ago when a lot of marketers went full bore on in-housing, and those were the brands that often ended up going back to a legacy model,” said Cullen Urbano, VP of consulting and marketing transformation in the US for Media.Monks.
In-housing requires sipping rather than chugging, if you will. Otherwise, you might have regrets in the morning.
“And it also has to be about more than just wanting to avoid paying fees to a programmatic buying agency,” Urbano said.
But marketers that do take the time and effort to shore up their data operations have a lot to gain, Feinberg said.
“Do I think every company has the appetite for this? Probably not,” he said. “But brands that have a good handle on their data and that develop this expertise are the ones that will be most successful in a future economy, especially with privacy regulations coming at the local, national and even global level.”
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