Because it can take a month or more to tie digital media to offline purchases, CPGs like Del Monte are used to relying on proxy metrics like viewability or engagement.
But Del Monte is piloting an Amobee product released Wednesday called Sales Accelerator, which aims to collapse that timeline to about a week and help CPGs pull shopper insights despite their lack of first-party data. While that’s not the real-time feedback that comes from ecommerce sales, it is relevant for programmatic use cases.
Del Monte had been looking for technologies that let it measure in-flight campaigns, said Jennifer Reiner, the CPG’s senior director of omnichannel marketing and ecommerce.
Instead of a media-mix modeling approach, where a campaign run in January is measured in February and by mid-March the learnings can be incorporated into the next media plan, Reiner said Amobee’s Sales Accelerator solution gives Del Monte weekly feedback on retail pick-up driven by the campaign.
“In the past we’ve had to wait until after a campaign to get feedback on what’s working and what isn’t and by then we’ve spent all the money,” she said.
The Sales Accelerator solution tracks sales through aggregated retail loyalty program data supplied by Oracle Data Cloud , whih can be hashed and connected to a person online if the brand is using first-party data, or it could be used to measure sales lift in a specific region.
Del Monte needs to buy that data because shoppers don’t purchase from DelMonte.com, and its only meaningful first-party data is a newsletter email list.
There are few scaled, third-party shopper data sources, namely Oracle Data Cloud, IRI and Nielsen Catalina Solutions, said Adel Farahmand, Amobee’s senior director of global sales engineering.
But only Oracle Data Cloud and IRI allow Amobee to apply user-level data from retail loyalty programs for programmatic buys.
And crackdowns on third-party data on major ad platforms and regulation like the upcoming GDPR in the EU largely don’t affect Sales Accelerator because it’s a measurement tool.
Facebook’s decision last month to kill off third-party data for targeting exempted offline measurement, including the Oracle data Amobee relies on for this service.
The next step in Del Monte’s offline sales measurement work is to build more marketing channels to specific retailers, Reiner said.
Kroger, Target and Walmart have ad platforms that allow CPGs to target the retailers’ customers and site browsers, she said, but it’s critical for the brand to understand who its own customers are and how it can drive foot traffic to preferred stores.
If a new product line is being launched with Walmart, for instance, or if a brand wants to drive as many shoppers as possible to Kroger because the supermarket is considering expanding the brand to more locations, then optimizing to retailer-specific sales, not just regional sales lift, could be an important tool.
At the end of the day, Reiner said, “the goal isn’t to serve impressions, it’s to buy products.”
