When Del Monte Foods Inc. started seeing erosion in consumer loyalty a few years ago, the company took a closer look at its digital marketing to find out how it could target more efficiently.
“We were looking to see how could we get really strong KPIs, and see what actions consumers were taking and why,” said Jennifer Reiner, senior director, omnichannel marketing and ecommerce for Del Monte. Metrics like impressions and click-through rates weren’t granular enough to generate the insights the food giant was looking for.
Enter digital marketing platform vendor Amobee. Its new Sales Accelerator solution combines digital ad data with offline purchase data while a campaign is active. That combo allows consumer packaged goods vendors like Del Monte to optimize online ad campaigns in real time, reach more consumers and drive sales.
Sales Accelerator combines purchase data for specific SKUs and UPCs with anonymized CRM data provided by Oracle Data Cloud. With those pieces sitting astride the Amobee marketing platform and its machine learning capabilities, business intelligence insights, and analytics functions, marketers get a dashboard to track specific KPIs and metrics. “From there, brands can see which products, regions and creative are working and optimize to be more impactful and make better use of their marketing dollars,” said Adel Farahmand, Amobee’s senior director of global sales engineering.
The capabilities have been a hit with beta user Del Monte. “What’s exciting about Amobee was to get sales data in real-time rather than wait to the end of a campaign to see how effective the campaign is, Reiner explained. “We could tweak the levers during the campaign.”
One of those tweaks was establishing “viewability” as a KPI, meaning the ad is immediately visible when the screen of a laptop, tablet or smartphone renders. Click-through rate was once a KPI, but Del Monte found that click-throughs didn’t necessarily translate to purchasing, Reiner said. “Viewability was a better KPI for driving sales, so we optimized around if they saw it versus if they clicked on it.”
Del Monte used Sales Accelerator for campaigns supporting its vegetable, fruit, and College Inn products. In the vegetable segment, Del Monte saw a 6% increase in viewability and a 225% increase in purchases among Millennials.
“The ultimate KPI is sales, which is what we’re always optimizing against,” Reiner wryly noted.
The company also saw more conversions among younger consumers with a video designed to drive sales; Del Monte subsequently re-purposed the video to other target segments based on that initial success. “The by-product of selling more products off the shelf is learning more about the customers who buy,” said Amobee’s Farahmand. So marketers don’t just get a more efficient media spend but also customer profiling data on top of that.
Reiner noted there are lots of ways to target based on brand; the Amobee service offers lots of ways to slice the data, using criteria like demographics, device type, usage behavior, and other identifiers like contextual buyers looking at relevant content. Weather is also a variable, since eating habits change with the seasons, Reiner explained. “All these targets we identified; we could see which segment was responding so we shifted dollars to targets” accordingly, she added. “We can also test different creative versions and optimize in a more efficient way as we see which creative is the most effective.”
Reiner also has responsibility for “shopper marketers,” who handle targeting and optimization for national grocer brands like Kroger or Walmart, and she’d like to expand the use of something like Sales Accelerator to help those partners with loyal shoppers. For the time being, though, those shopper marketers zealously guard their data since the grocer sector is notoriously competitive. “A lot of retailers have sophisticated databases, but they protect theur data and don’t allow us to tag it,” she explained. “They’re getting better at sharing data, but ideally we’d have more sharing.”
Sales Accelerator is available now; Amobee did not provide information about pricing, service structure, or volume discounts.
