Ipsos MMA (Marketing Management Analytics)

Introducing Demand Signals – An always-on, nimble approach to measure, optimize and interact with your marketing plans while re-informing traditional approaches

Addressing the Challenge:

Sometimes it takes a crisis to really shake things up and drive change.

Late one April night in this damnable year, the Ipsos MMA team was processing reams and reams of data looking for answers to explain how changes in marketplace dynamics, competition and consumer behavior affect marketing response during the crisis, in a more agile way. The goal was to put it all on the table – all of the data, including even data we weren’t collecting yet, the host of analytic techniques and technologies we deploy to try and predict customer behaviors to help advertisers address an upside-down-world that was seemingly becoming more unpredictable each day. That included predicting customer behaviors and marketplace dynamics and understanding the interactions between them.

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By processing trillions of bytes of ultra-granular data that was received on a daily basis we were able to mine the changes that we were seeing. The results presented findings that correlated marketplace conditions related to the pandemic to changes in consumer behavior, media consumption, brand preference and critical interactions across all variables. Big data inherently always has a lot to say in the right hands and with smart statisticians at work, but to have it playback real-time signals that reshape market demand in an interpretable way so that results can be played forward is potentially game-changing.

The Value Proposition

“What the team discovered was that streams of rich, granular data, could be aligned to more robust data taxonomies using algorithms to fuel a new approach to making more forward-looking, smart marketing decisions. The new data taxonomy provides an enhanced ability to read, understand and decompose data signals and algorithmically attribute them to meaningful marketplace changes. By leveraging relevant data streams real-time signals based upon dynamic and evolving market conditions are created that enable better prediction of changes in demand and media responsiveness,” said Pat Cummings, CEO of Ipsos MMA. “These real-time signals enrich our understanding of an evolving marketplace across customer segments, sales channels and by geographies, and can be applied on a global scale based upon data availability. The “demand signals” are used to re-inform, or recalibrate, historical predictive models that may have been altered in the face of changing market conditions and customer needs. Using event-level, daily and weekly data to generate these signals make it possible for us to quickly turn-around results for advertisers to better predict future demand as well as understand which marketing strategies and tactics will be most effective faster than ever before,” said Cummings.

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The value of being able to accurately measure the effectiveness of marketing and its ROI has never been in question. The 2nd or 3rd biggest budget line item for most companies is the marketing budget. CMOs and CFOs debate over how much is needed and how much is enough, but every corporate executive knows the value of marketing in building customer loyalty and driving sales. All of this is particularly true during and post a major crisis. Studies have consistently shown that companies who market effectively in a crisis emerge significantly stronger than those who don’t. “Successful marketing-driven organizations live in an “always-on” environment where measurement and analytics are not static, marketplace dynamics are changing constantly, and critical decisions are made daily,” said Doug Brooks, EVP at Ipsos MMA. “There are so many variables that advertisers are tasked to control, including creative, spend, investment mix, timing, audience targeting, ad quality, and ad delivery, and there are even more that they don’t control including media inventory, cost, macroeconomic factors, category dynamics, competition and weather. The pandemic forced us to think differently about everything from the data and analytics to expediting and activating results. The result of many long days, sleepless nights and lots of innovation is “Demand Signals”, an approach that captures all of these interactions in real-time to guide and future-proof simulations and scenario planning,” said Brooks.

Ipsos MMA is planning on releasing “Demand Signals” in conjunction with its Unified Marketing Measurement and Optimization platform in the first quarter of 2021.

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