When it comes to measuring sales lift and ROI on media campaigns, CPG brands have traditionally been shooting in the dark.
But with more real-time data sets available in market, CPGs are embracing granularity when optimizing and measuring spend.
Earlier this year, Georgia-Pacific, the paper product manufacturer whose brands include Brawny and Quilted Northern, tapped into a partnership between point-of-sale data provider Catalina and TV analytics company Samba TV to measure its total cross-channel media spend on a more granular and frequent basis.
“For many years, organizations have had challenges even just [measuring] TV,” said Kenita Johnson, senior manager of marketing analytics for Georgia-Pacific’s consumer products group. “Understanding TV plus digital was intriguing.”
The combined data set is based on a representative ACR research panel of 4 million TV viewing households measured by Samba TV. Catalina, which can map in-store transactions to 91 million US homes, overlays its purchase data sets against those viewing households to understand which channels are driving people to shop.
Samba and Catalina’s data sets overlap directly on more than 5 million deterministic TV viewers, said Brian Dunphy, SVP of strategic partnerships at Catalina.
“The genesis of the partnership was bringing together the deterministic data sets to drive accountability and ROI transparency that big brands and marketers are looking for,” he said.
Georgia-Pacific is tapping into the data set to measure ROI on both linear and digital spend across its Quilted Northern, Angel Soft, Dixie and Sparkle brands for all of its 2020 campaigns. The biggest benefit of the data is the ability to receive real-time reporting on deduplicated reach and frequency of campaigns, as well as monthly reporting on campaign ROI performance, Johnson said.
“We [previously] didn’t have any real-time measurement for TV,” she said. “We did media mix models which included TV spend. Now we have the ability to make optimizations faster.”
Real-time reporting allows Georgia-Pacific to optimize toward channels and networks driving ROI. For example, its brands can increase spend on networks that are driving sales while suppressing media on other networks and channels to manage frequency.
“We look at which networks, channels and OTT apps are performing according to Catalina data and try to shift more spend toward those,” said Aden Zaman, SVP of strategy and business development at Samba TV.
Georgia-Pacific plans to rely on this combined data set for its 2021 upfront planning process as well as to inform scatter buys through the remainder of 2020. “Where should we invest into specific networks working the hardest for us?” Johnson said.
Brands can access the combined data set and measurement services directly from Samba or Catalina. The solution also extends to point of sale offers, allowing brands to measure which campaigns drove in-store coupon usage. Brands can also leverage DCO tools to adopt real-time messaging to consumers based on sales data.
For now, the data set is only available for measurement and analytics purposes, but Samba and Catalina plan to launch a targeting solution as well. The companies aim to have dozens of CPGs using the solution by the end of the year.
“We’re working on taking TV viewing and purchase-based audiences to help a brand activate across channels,” Dunphy said. “Our focus is to help brands mitigate media waste.”
