Upwave Launches Customer Forecast Industry-First Metric to Empower Marketers With the Most Comprehensive Data for Driving Future Customer Growth

Leading Brand Advertising Analytics Platform Unveils “Holy Grail of Marketing Measurement,” Becoming More Valuable than Sales Lift and Multi-Touch Attribution

Upwave, the leading brand analytics platform for marketers, today announced the launch of its new platform feature Customer Forecast, designed to give brand marketers the most comprehensive reporting metric to understand which media tactics are driving future customer growth and identify long-term media efficiencies. An industry-first metric, Customer Forecast is validated by actual sales data, without relying on short-term metrics such as Multi-Touch Attribution or Sales Lift.

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The Multi-Touch Attribution & Sales Lift Challenge

According to McKinsey & Company, marketers spend $560 billion annually on global advertising. However, standard cross-channel MROI approaches, such as marketing-mix modeling (MMM) and multi-touch attribution modeling (MTA), to track the effectiveness of that spend are often unsatisfactory due to a well-known short-termism bias in backward-looking methodologies.

Another McKinsey survey found that 45% of CFOs said the reason marketing proposals had been declined or not fully funded in the past was that they didn’t demonstrate a clear line to value.

An everyday challenge marketers face is the inability to tie top-funnel brand investments to bottom-of-funnel outcomes. Both Multi-Touch Attribution and Sales Lift have inherent value, however, their short-termism bias prevents CMOs from demonstrating the MROI of brand investments, and prevents media execs from identifying long-term media efficiencies. This bias is now even driving a “race to the bottom” that threatens TV advertising, which is increasingly being compared to lower-cost digital channels on short-term metrics for which TV isn’t designed.

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“Ultimately, methodologies like MTA undervalue the longer-term revenue impact of TV, and other brand campaigns. Upwave’s Customer Forecast metric is really the holy grail of marketing measurement–proving that your brand spend leads to real customers,” said Ken Archer, SVP Product, Upwave.

Introducing Upwave Customer Forecast for Brand Marketers

Upwave’s Customer Forecast feature was developed to give marketers a more comprehensive understanding of the paid brand media tactics driving future customer growth. Upwave’s Customer Forecast metric helps fill this gap, proving that investing in brands is investing in customers for long-term growth, not just short-term Sales Lift.

The key benefits of Upwave’s Customer Forecast for brand marketers include:

1. Customer acquisition. With Customer Forecast, brand marketers are now able to see the number of new customers they’ve acquired or retained who have been exposed to their brand campaign. This benefit now ties top-of-funnel metrics to bottom-of-funnel outcomes.

2. Minimized consideration timeframe. Customer Forecast has the ability to show the actual length of time between exposure(s) to a brand campaign and becoming a customer – helping them better understand the length of their sales cycle and measure outcomes of brand advertising in a way they couldn’t traditionally.

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