Today, we see advertising around every corner. So how do companies, such as global brewer Anheuser-Busch InBev (ABI), make sure their creative efforts are noticed? They go where the beer drinkers (or their desired consumers) are—and across industries, that increasingly means going digital.
Marketers today are allocating budget to digital advertising to ensure they are reaching audiences across platforms. But effective digital media execution requires stringent and disciplined performance management in order to get the most from such spending.
ABI has successfully implemented a digital strategy, achieving twice the digital ROI as its peer competitors and compared to the consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry average. At the 2015 Consumer 360 event, Kathy French, senior vice president of Nielsen’s Advertiser Solutions spoke with Harry Lewis, senior director of consumer connections at Anheuser-Busch InBev (ABI) to learn more about the company’s efforts.
“The secrets to success with digital media are: leveraging data to help objectively allocate media, managing the digital media execution, adopting creative best practices, tracking the results, and then doing it all over again,” said Kathy French. ABI has accomplished its success by adopting a series of such performance management processes, including:
- Reaching as many of the right people as possible
- Monitoring and optimizing viewability
- Ensuring strong creative quality
- Allocating media spending across channels and across brands appropriately
REAL-WORLD LESSONS FROM ANHEUSER-BUSCH INBEV
Developing a clear performance management strategy is essential to having successful digital advertising campaigns. “There’s no magic here—it just takes good data, discipline and process,” said Lewis. ABI focuses on translating data-fueled insights into effective marketing and media execution that leads to strong media ROIs.
ABI knows that to win in beer, it needs to win with Millennials. Millennials aged 21-27 are the next generation of beer drinkers, and they represent 36% of the industry’s growth in the U.S. Millennials are also the most digitally-savvy generation the world has ever seen. To market effectively to Millennials, ABI has created a measurement framework that allows ABI to optimize its digital creative content, as well as its digital media execution ensuring Millennials are viewing the content created for them.
ABI’s measurement framework includes leveraging pre-testing for online video; rigorously tracking unique audience to ensure that its ads are reaching as many of the right consumers as possible; fielding digital ad resonance services to assess the impact of advertising on brand perceptions; and diligently using marketing mix insights to determine how to allocate media dollars within a channel (e.g., sports programming vs. entertainment programming), across channels (e.g., digital vs. TV), and across brands.
As a result of these steps, ABI has achieved ROIs that are the envy of the industry, over twice the CPG average!
