How can companies eliminate inefficiencies in their media spend and move dollars towards things that work best for the business? We talk to Bill Cramblit, Senior Manager of Marketing Analytics and Optimization at Molson Coors for some answers.
Tell us about your role and the decisions you impact.
I lead our precision market analytics team to analyze our marketing activity, focused on marketing attribution with first, second and third party data to target, interact and analyze our marketing activity in North America.
My job is focused on three areas, multi-touch attribution (MTA); our data lake connecting known consumer activity to actions, enabling us to model and experiment on the fly. And thirdly test and learn where we conduct measurement at a store and regional level using in-market experiments.
We are working towards an integrated solution, but right now, our MTA process is used to optimize and re-arrange our marketing budget and the largest spends across all our brands on a monthly basis. It also builds the foundation for how we plan to spend in the future. The biggest question is to determine which creative, piece of copy or content or tactic works best.
How does this help to drive growth?
Ultimately what we do is eliminate inefficiencies in our media spend and move dollars towards things that work best for the business. It’s a challenge to measure the precise impact, but meanwhile our estimates show we have a sizeable impact in terms of media spend savings which can be reinvested in the business.
What kind of data are you collecting and analyzing?
We measure online and TV and are expanding our offline coverage to include a broader array of formats like out of home and print.
We have number of third party partnerships to help us assemble a lot of data including loyalty card transactions, TV data, and other exposures that we build into our systems so we can run our models in a privacy-safe way without having to acquire first party transaction data.
When working with a third party, how do you know whether the data is reliable?
It’s a challenge. We have a lengthy process before we contract for a data input to understand how it represents the populations we are trying to measure and how the data is collected. We also use some weightings during the measurement phase to ensure the results are as clean as possible. For TV data we have partnerships where we can look at the database and align it with other data sources to see if it checks out.
Now that Google has said it will remove all third party cookies from its chrome browser, which will impact independent third party media measurement, how do you think this will play out?
That is hot on our minds as it threatens MTA and anything that is cookie based. Google has reacted to a trust issue of concern to the public. It gives our sector the chance to redefine the way data is collected and to look at data sets that are fully opted in, but advertisers will have to rethink their stacks and how they are building their data sets. In the short run, we will likely lose some information. A big issue for MTA has always been walled gardens and that will continue to be an issue as companies like Google will move as much data as possible onto their own data hubs.
This could fragment the industry and there will be independent solutions for each publisher and retailer that could be strung together but the days of cross screen attribution could be numbered unless the sector can come together to figure out a general solution.
How does marketing analytics complement insights and other teams at Miller Coors?
Our group works with our brand marketers, insights teams, advanced analytics Centre of Excellence and media team which we are part of. In terms of complementing insights, for a long time we had a number of legacy tools. The tools our team now works with are pretty new. Each tool has a methodology with a distinct purpose so we apply each tool for what they were designed to do to ensure we don’t overextend the truthfulness of an output.
How do you optimize communication to reach the various decision-makers?
We provide our leadership with portfolio reporting that narrows down to the facts that require her attention or have already been addressed, so she knows about what is succeeding and what we need to change.
For our partners in the business, we have a monthly sit down where we share information on how each creative, length or network compares and we discuss possible outcomes, including next steps or the narrative to explain the different levels.
How has the way you work changed in the last few years and what changes do you expect to see?
If we were to go back five or six years, our industry was using marketing mix analysis and legacy data. Since 2018, we have been ramping up our investment in future proof technologies to move faster and make confident decisions with speed using up-to-date data.
Where is it going? Privacy reforms and retention of consumer data based on full consent opt-ins rather than more passive means will be a major change to measurement and ad and marketing tech will drive developments in the US.
I hope there will be a non-centralized universal standard to data collection that’s transparent and usable to allow marketers to measure and optimize as needed and allow consumers to retain their rights and control over their data. That would be an incredible move for the sector and would really enable so much from a measurement standpoint of view.
