Back in the day, consumers enjoyed truly personalized service: Shopkeepers knew their customers, understood their needs and could fulfill them with personalized recommendations, rewarding those who were the most loyal. Times have changed, however.
Terms like “programmatic display,” “big data,” and “native” have become industry buzzwords, but few marketers actually know how to make use of these tools and strategies to engage consumers in a meaningful way. Brands and marketers need expert guidance and the right partnerships in place to navigate this new terrain and leverage data in a more purposeful way.
Earlier this year, i2c—the customer insights and communications business that is a joint venture between Aimia (owner and operator of the Nectar program, the largest loyalty card program in the U.K.)—and Sainsbury’s (the U.K.’s second biggest supermarket chain) looked to Nielsen to help them deliver a campaign for their client Carling, one of the most popular beer brands in the U.K. Carling was looking to leverage programmatic media to bolster non-seasonal sales, drive incremental aisle visits among existing and new customers, and re-engage lapsed shoppers.
“When picking a partner we look for two main things: the right people and good housekeeping. We need people we can work with and that we can trust, and we need to know our data is going to be safe and secure. The Nielsen Marketing Cloud offered all of that,” explained Andrew Muzzelle, digital media director at i2c.
i2c used its in-store and online anonymized purchase data to select the right seed audience, and the Nielsen Marketing Cloud team modeled and scaled the audience for Carling. Audience segments, built using dozens of key customer characteristics, were reached across programmatic channels, with i2c evaluating and reporting on the in-store and online sales impact. The national campaign, titled ‘Great British Moments,’ resulted in significant audience reach and a 19% sales uplift overall. This earned Carling an impressive 4.1x campaign ROI—for every marketing pound Carling spent, it received four pounds in return. And earlier this year, i2c and the Nielsen Marketing Cloud won The Drum Digital Trading Award for Most Effective Use of Data for their collaboration on the campaign.
The Nielsen Marketing Cloud successfully launched in North American markets in April and recently launched in key European markets on June 17, 2016. The platform, which provides world-class data, analytics, media planning, marketing activation and data management platform (DMP) capabilities is available immediately in the U.K. and France and will soon be available in Germany, Italy and Spain.
The Carling case study and award win were front and center during the EU launch event presentation. In a fireside chat, Matt Bennathan, vice president and managing director, Nielsen Marketing Cloud Europe, and Muzzelle discussed how first-in-class data can take a brand’s campaign to the next level.
“Reach is incredibly important,” explained Muzzelle. “And not just reaching anybody—you have to reach the right audience.” Bennathan added: “The breadth of data is important, but it is actually the depth of data that allows our data science team to produce the quality of the models they do. At the moment, we are seeing 50 billion or so moments of online behavior data points every single day, which provides our data scientists with a vast quantity of data to model out.”
The chat concluded with a look into the future for the two companies. Muzzelle explained: “…We are now looking to do more multi-channel projects, such as in-app and mobile. Nielsen can help us match individuals across device IDs. That’s where we see the growth coming from.”
“Yes, it’s a core area of growth for us,” Bennathan concurred. “The successful integration of hundreds of millions of device IDs across Europe, in combination with our vast data assets, allows us to do all sorts of cool stuff from a cross-screen functionality standpoint. We also currently are working on a couple of Multi-Touch Attribution pilots in the U.K. as part of the Nielsen Marketing Cloud; it will be interesting to learn what is happening across different channels and across different points in the consumer purchase journey. This is going to be extremely insightful moving forward.”
