I am very excited about today’s release of yet another batch of fantastic campaign results for an Ad Age 20 CPG brand. I am excited about this release in particular because of the use of both Nielsen and Vizu measurement technology for this campaign – an important step in establishing a link between improvement in purchase intent and improvement in offline purchase rate.
The Nielsen data establishes that this campaign, like our other SalesLink campaigns, drove a fantastic ROI as measured by offline sales compared to media investment. This metric is obviously critical because 95% of retail commerce still occurs offline. It’s easy to forget that in Silicon Valley, but ultimately advertising is about selling stuff and it makes a lot of sense to focus on the 95% rather than the 5%, regardless of medium. The Nielsen data is great in that sense, but it also has two drawbacks; Results aren’t available for 3 months after the campaign ends and those results have very limited granularity so it can be difficult to know what it was about the campaign that worked best.
Adding Vizu to the picture allows us to get granular data about what’s working best (creative, media mix, frequency) during the campaign, when we can still use those results to optimize. Vizu measures purchase intent not actual purchases like Nielsen, but we saw a very intuitive relationship between the two for this campaign. If this relationship holds reliably through further studies, then Vizu can be a very important tool in improving campaign impact. We don’t stop measuring offline sales, we just know a lot more a lot faster about what makes those results better.
Brands repeatedly tell us they want to be confident their vendors are doing what they say, but even more important are a) proving that their campaigns are effective where it really matters and b) helping them understand why.
Say what we do, do what we say and drive proven results. That’s our business.