Editor’s Note: Insights That Work is a showcase of how the GRIT Top 50 Most Innovative Suppliers create solutions to some of the biggest challenges in insights today. This year’s edition provides case studies on brands like Nestle, Shell, Frito-Lay, and more.
Challenge
Our client, Engine, a cutting-edge insights provider and marketing agency was working with a leading telecommunications company that wanted to hone their advertising strategy and improve customer acquisition efforts. Their telecommunications client was concerned that they weren’t spending their ad dollars wisely. The CMO was up at night, wondering, are we spending too much on the wrong types of advertisements? Even if an ad performs well, is it reaching my target audience? Could we better focus our strategy on one type of platform or a specific type of creative? ProdegeMR employed its large proprietary panel and profiling capabilities to conduct this ambitious research among over 100,000 targeted respondents throughout the year.
Solution
To answer these questions, the team at Engine designed a tracking research program and partnered with ProdegeMR, whose robust proprietary panel of U.S. consumers provided the 312 survey respondents needed each day (over 114,000 respondents throughout the course over 12 months!). Engine needed to know much more about each survey participant than what he or she would have the patience to tell in an online survey. They leveraged ProdegeMR’s permission-based deep panelist profiling and appended demographic and media usage variables to the survey data. Each respondent profile was enriched further with digital behavioral data, ad exposure, and geolocation data.
By incorporating profiling data and behavioral measures via ProdegeMR’s impressive capabilities, Engine had the opportunity to discard some current survey content and replace it with valuable additions, including the messages that consumers take out of the ads they’ve seen. By layering in permissioned digital behavioral data, Engine enabled their telecom client to get a firsthand glimpse into each respondent’s actual online lives. The addition of ad exposure data afforded Engine the ability to verify recall and judge ad effectiveness not on self-reported measures, but with actual ad impression metrics.
Outcome
These holistic, data-enhanced profiles from ProdegeMR enabled Engine to model the target market’s search behaviors out to the digital environment at large, creating lookalike models for deployment by their Client’s media agencies. The result? A holistic read on true brand health and ad effectiveness enhanced targeting, and more efficient ad spending for their telecommunications client, which yielded a 30% ROI.