There was a time when the yogurt company Chobani had to track its digital marketing activity vendor by vendor.
But last October, it put out an RFP to consolidate its activity with a marketing cloud.
“One of the benefits with a marketing cloud is it gives us a holistic picture of all of our digital activity,” said Eddie Revis, the company’s senior director of marketing and brand development.
The company eventually chose Nielsen Marketing Cloud. Launched in 2016, it’s a young entrant compared to offerings from stalwarts such as Adobe and Salesforce.
“This was the first time we were engaging with a project of this nature,” Revis said. “We wanted to make sure that as consumers moved their lives online and looked for more opportunities with brands beyond the traditional media mix, we wanted to make sure [to connect] in a way that’s relevant.”
Connected TV was a major focus, said Nielsen EVP Damian Garbaccio. “That’s a sign of Chobani’s innovation, and that’s frankly where we’re innovating.”
Revis declined to discuss specifics of Chobani’s connected-TV strategy as it relates to the Nielsen Marketing Cloud. “Any and all available components of what makes up the Nielsen Marketing Cloud are either things we’ve considered or will consider,” he said.
Chobani is one of a handful of clients using Nielsen’s complete marketing cloud, Garbaccio said.
“[Chobani is] using, in addition to that infrastructure, our data for planning and activation and our measurement for profile analytics,” Garbaccio said. “They’re using all three legs of the marketing cloud: the data, the DMP [data management platform] and the measurement solution.”
Nielsen claims its DMP, which it inherited in 2015 when it acquired eXelate, can connect data from planning and activation all the way through to measurement, whereas other DMPs focus primarily on segmenting audiences for activation.
Certainly, Nielsen has some unique assets, including data from Nielsen Catalina, which tells marketers whether consumers actually bought their products. That type of data is particularly valuable to CPGs like Chobani, which, unlike online retailers, have no direct line into consumer buying activity.
Nielsen also has tight relationships with media companies through its Watch audience measurement business. It’s no surprise that relations with media and CPGs have created convenient inroads for boosting Nielsen Marketing Cloud’s client base. While the solution seems CPG-centric, Garbaccio points out that it’s spread across a variety of verticals.
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Chobani’s goal is to simply get faster.
Revis noted that most CPGs have to wait a year to gauge the results of their marketing mix. “We’re fortunate enough to have a more frequent pulse,” Revis said, though he declined to specify how frequent.
“There’s so much rich data and insights out there,” Revis said. “Our challenge is to grow and, as we do, we needed real insight faster and in a nimbler fashion. And that’s all part of Chobani’s startup culture. How do we get that information to all of our teams and the entire organization faster?”
