Nov. 16: Accelerating Modeling the Full Value of Marketing Investments
Nov. 17: Accelerating Data Science
Nov. 18: Accelerating Analytics-Driven Business Results
Nov. 19: Accelerating Recovery

The ARF and Sequent Partners paired to present the Attribution & Analytics Accelerator©, a rigorous four-day forum focused exclusively on attribution, marketing mix models and the science of marketing performance measurement. The boldest and brightest minds took the stage to share the latest industry innovations – real case studies were supplemented with in-depth discussions led by moderators who knew what to ask. The Accelerator featured high-profile experts and marketers on the front lines who debated new solutions and addressed unmet technical needs.

 

Day One Sponsored By

Do we have the analytics toolkit we need to produce a complete view of marketing effects? How do elements work together, and do we know how to orchestrate their use holistically? Where are we seeing success with more granular MMM, more aggregated MTAs and unified modeling?

Narrow focus on immediate traffic or sales leaves behind everything we know about how advertising and the rest of the marketing mix work together to influence consumer attitudes and behaviors, short-term and long-term.

Key concepts that cannot be left by the wayside include synergies, halos, carryover, emotional response, loyalty, price, distribution, and every other marketing KPI essential to business success.

Ten thought-leaders shared their solutions to these contemporary, business critical, challenges.

Session Leader: Greg Pharo, Global Director, Media Analytics & Advertising Research at The Coca-Cola Company

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 MICROSOFT: Realizing the Full Value of Advertising: A Granular MMM Success Story
Microsoft’s marketing evaluation systems had been balkanized with separate success measures, derived from separate systems, managed by separate research teams. Kathleen will report on how they have unified these with a holistic approach that incorporates both short-term and long-term outcomes with a more granular model of direct and indirect effects. As a result, Microsoft is able to make data based decisions about the right balance between brand-building advertising and promotion.
Kathleen Magnuson — Sr. Data and Applied Scientist, Customer & Market Research, Microsoft

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MAZDA: Generating and Disseminating Analytics Insights to Maximize the Full Value of Marketing for Brand Growth
Mazda faces a multi-faceted marketing challenge to drive brand predisposition, motivate the consumer along the path to purchase to the showroom with a willingness to pay a premium price. To address this complex puzzle (including multiple layers from manufacturer to dealer associations to dealers) Mazda has synthesized analytic insights across carlines and markets to optimize resource allocations across upper and lower funnel strategies and guide choice of tactics, putting the right information in the right hands at the right time to drive business success.
Satya Menon — Managing Partner, ROI Practice, Kantar
Brad Audet —  CMO, Mazda
Eric Uchida — SVP, Data, Analytics & Technology, Garage Team Mazda

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CHURCH & DWIGHT: How Trojan Harnessed Its Full Marketing Horsepower
Trojan’s marketing team is leveraging priors from attribution studies, household panel measures and store-level trade analyses to create a comprehensive and complete view of the brand. Equity building investments are value for their long-range contribution, as well as their halo effects and interactions with short-term tactics to influence consumer behavior.
Bruce Weiss — VP, Health & Well Being, Church & Dwight
Greg Dolan — CEO and Co-Founder, Keen Decision Systems

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COTTON, INCORPORATED: Measuring MORE of the Marketing Metrics that Matter
Cotton Incorporated expanded its marketing measurement to more fully explain how marketing influences consumer behaviors as reflected in multiple KPIs across the consumer journey. The results leverage indirect and long-term effects and generate insights to optimize marketing’s reach and influence. As a result, Cotton Incorporated now more effectively allocates its marketing investments and better communicate its marketing performance results to its many stakeholders.
Kim Kitchings — SVP, Consumer Marketing, Cotton Incorporated
Jim Friedman — CEO, Marketing Attribution Partners

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NIELSEN: Brand Stability in Unstable Times: Managing Your Marketing for the Long-Term
With Brand being one of our most valuable assets, finding the balance of protecting brand equity while driving immediate growth—all within a very uncertain global economy—is incredibly challenging. However, it’s possible with the right mix of proven band + outcome metrics and normative benchmarks to fuel your full funnel marketing plans.
Tsvetan Tsvetkov — SVP Marketing Effectiveness, Nielsen

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Panel Discussion

 

Day Two Sponsored By

Data challenges are the single greatest barrier to successful digital and television attribution — privacy, identity, the demise of cookies, walled gardens, discordant television data, and so on. These obstacles fundamentally undermine the vision of cross-platform attribution and chances for success.  What data solutions have been tried? Which have failed; which have succeeded? Where should the industry focus its resources to produce short-term solutions? What are the long-term solutions that should be considered?

Session Leader: George Ivie, CEO & Executive Director of the Media Ratings Council

 IAB/CADILLAC: Driving Campaign Effectiveness in a Cookieless World
The ability to measure media and attribute outcomes is being challenged. As more privacy regulations develop, and browsers deprecate cookies, cross-site tracking and identifiers, the promise of truly accountable media is being compromised.  Angelina presented a variety of solutions that companies are taking to prepare for a future without cookies and identifiers, including improving first party data and privacy-first approaches.  We heard about tech solutions that are being developed which improve measurement across multiple channels, platforms and devices such as the VAST standards and data aggregation. Eric shared how Cadillac is coping with data challenges to cross-platform measurement, reach/frequency and attribution.
Angelina Eng — VP, Measurement & Attribution, IAB & IAB Tech Lab
Eric Neville — Sr. Manager, Media & Audience Strategy, Cadillac

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 REGIONS BANK: Cross-Channel Audience Impact Based Planning with Incomplete Consumer Data
How does Regions Bank leverage an innovative solution to consumer attributes and cross-channel measurement while suffering incomplete data? Incomplete exposure and KPIs data as well as data with varied granularity has stymied their measurement approach until now.  How does their new solution enable them to build, recommend and target audiences based on media impact without identity resolution? Whether an advertiser has a great deal of consumer level data — or virtually none — this new advancement enables consumer-level effectiveness measurement.
Alyssa W. Blair — SVP, Regions Corporate Marketing, Regions Bank
Michael Cohen — Chief Technology and Data Officer, Marketing Evolution

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CIMM: Getting Attribution Right: An Exploration and Best Practices for Television Data Inputs in Attribution Modeling
Attribution providers offer many different modeling approaches and rely on different television data sources for optimization and measures of financial return. Different data streams preferred by leading modelers frequently lead to dramatically different results and business decisions. CIMM sought to unpack this data issue and learn about what really drives the difference in attribution results. Howard shared results of this landmark study and the solutions it prescribes; Jane spoke to the role of our industry to realize those solutions.
Jane Clarke — CEO & Managing Director, Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement
Howard Shimmel — President, Janus Strategy & Insights

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ANA/AIMM: Remove Blindfold Before Targeting!
Multicultural digital identity data has been a black box with unknown accuracy and coverage.  While this can be a challenge for targeting, it threatens the validity of multicultural attribution and analytics.  How can we attribute conversions to any consumer segment if the identity of those consumers is not accurately specified?  While this study focused on multicultural identity, this is equally problematic for any specific consumer segment. Aaron shared brand new, publicly available benchmarks and reveal what you can expect of multicultural identity data.  Carlos discussed the industry’s outcry for greater transparency and data quality coming from ANA’s AIMM initiative.
Carlos Santiago — Co-Founder, ANA/AIMM and President, Santiago Solutions Group
Aaron Fetters — Head of Client Development, Truth{set}

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ANALYTIC PARTNERS: The Next Evolution of Analytics for Decisioning
The ongoing data apocalypse has been widely discussed but how do organizations evolve measurement strategies in this new world with limited consumer tracking and data access? How does analytics evolve so businesses can continue to make decisions based on accurate insights? Analytic Partners’ AVP Katie deGorter highlighted the newest evolutions in measurement and how some of the smartest brands are approaching the age of data deprecation.
Katie deGorter — Associate Vice President, Analytic Partners

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Day Three Sponsored By
How are the leading brands applying attribution and analytics to improve marketing decisions?  What are the keys to organizational alignment that is essential for enabling effective activation of analytic insights? Who is successfully optimizing creative mix and media selection — beyond digital and television — even beyond media to encompass the full marketing mix?  Which analytics capabilities and processes have proven to drive business performance?

Session Leader: John Leeman — VP Integrated Marketing, PetSmart

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 KROGER: Adaptive Analytics for Speed to Insight and Real-Time / Right Time Decisioning
Kroger, the largest supermarket in the U.S., shared how they leverage analytics to improve marketing decision-making through a program that leverages an innovative “always-on” modeling approach? Kroger’s program is helping track performance, shape quicker decisioning, and inspiring a test and learn culture for the organization.  The program provides results in real time, holistically measuring across marketing and non-marketing drivers, as well as factoring in controllable and non-controllable factors while continually testing new capabilities. Through this, Kroger has been able to actuate a transformation towards stronger branding while adapting more quickly to market challenges, including the ongoing pandemic.
Sarah Landsman — VP Marketing, Kroger
Mike Menkes — SVP, Analytic Partners

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AXA: Machine Learning Models for Underwriting and Pricing Around the World
AXA has been building and deploying machine learning enabled models for underwriting and pricing utilizing internal data merged with third party data. They shared their innovative analytic approach and the process that enables them to guide the business decisions of over 100 users and their more than 5000 accounts for this billion-dollar global business. Beyond the technology, there is a fascinating and instructive human story about the wrangling required to build, deliver, and maintain this business critical capability on a regular basis.
Newcombe Clark — Business Solutions, Strategic Analytics, AXA XL
Rob Moss — Global Head of Pricing, Marine and Crisis Management, AXA XL

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CITI: A True Story of Unified Analytics
In today’s fast paced world, analytics can act as a way for brands to make smarter decisions about where to invest their dollars and how to effectively build their brand. In the real world, the right approach goes beyond simply looking at ROI, but instead explores how brands can actually use the insights from analytics, blend it with other research as necessary and then implement those findings in the market.
Marc Vermut — VP Marketing Solutions, Neustar
Anthony Michelini — Managing Director, Global Head of Brand Strategy, Media and Analytics, Citi

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KELLOGG: Leveraging the SuperLearner’s Counterfactual for Scenario Planning
Kellogg is leveraging a machine learning sales effect method that produces a counterfactual with estimates for sales with and without advertising for every household.  They shared the kinds of insights these offer on targeting (which groups of homes would be the optimal target and an estimate of the return they could provide), creative vs. media contributions, and the value of loyalty towards having a holistic view of ad performance against those that were reached, and how it would have performed against those that were not reached.
Janelle Bowman — Sr. Director, Advanced Data & Integrated Analytics, Kellogg Company
Leslie Wood — Chief Research Officer, NCS
Shobana Balasubramaniam — Sr. Manager, R&D, NCS

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 iSpot.tv — K12: Combining real-time TV tracking and mixed models to double TV ROI
 K12’s marketing team knew that TV ads had a long-term impact beyond the first days of airing, but measuring that was difficult. In order to quickly and statistically detect TV ad effectiveness over time, the team was up against varying coefficients, massive volumes of data, and challenging complexity.  K12 discussed how they overcame these challenges by combining real-time TV tracking data with traditional marketing mix models to measure varying and long-term TV ad effectiveness and ultimately double the ROI of national TV advertising.
David Young — Vice President of Demand Generation, K12
Sean Muller — CEO & Founder, iSpot.tv

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Panel Discussion

Day Four Sponsored By

How do we leverage models, attribution, experimentation and other analytics to guide brands to a successful recovery following COVID-19 and the recession?

Session Leader: Thomas Bauer — Partner at McKinsey & Company

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MOLSON COORS: Analytics During the Pandemic — Unearthing Inherent Consumer Behaviors and Business Building Opportunities
COVID-19 has presented an unusual real-world experiment for advertisers. Consumption of many CPG categories have increased setting a new-normal. In this scenario, marketers ask, “Is advertising still relevant if products are flying off the shelves with reduced advertising?”; “Is this externality helping us discover inherent consumer behavior thereby providing us segmentation and messaging opportunities post-COVID?”; “Is optimization of advertising still relevant?” These and other questions were answered by MolsonCoors and IRI through attribution analysis of select brand campaign performance in the recent past.
Bill Cramblit — Sr. Manager, Precision Marketing Analytics & Optimization, MolsonCoors
Vijoy Gopalakrishnan — SVP Product Development, Media COE, IRI

 

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ESTEE LAUDER COMPANIES: COVID-19 Recovery — Analytic Insights to Business Actions
Estée Lauder Companies faces highly varied COVID-19 scenarios across their global businesses. Their business decisions must be appropriate to the current situation on the ground — and they must be smart.  To meet this challenge, predictive analytics were triangulated with a variety of other resources.  Prior results of the impact of the Great Recession (including both before, and after, from 2007 to 2011) provided a sense of the magnitude of potential change.  Predictive consumer insights were leveraged via consumer research about intended future behaviors.  Forecasts for the beauty category and key sub-categories were developed for the next 5 quarters, based on predictive analytics and forecasting.
Doug Jensen — SVP Consumer Marketing Analytics & Innovation Insights, Enterprise Marketing, The Estée Lauder Companies

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GSK: New to Brand Buyer Insights; Advanced Analytics for Creating Engagement and Retention Strategies
GSK profiled new-to-brand buyers that bought their products at the start of the pandemic. Identifying similarities and differences versus current brand and category buyers in terms of demographic, product purchase and media use characteristics.  These insights enabled GSK to reach those audiences via programmatic and retain them with custom creative.  Attribution was used to measure the effectiveness of the audience selection and tailored creative alignment and to inform optimizations.  Case-studies were shared from among GSK’s portfolio of brands.
Scott Grenz — VP Media, GSK
Steve Simpson — Media Analytics & Insight Management Global Practice Lead, Publicis

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CHICK-FIL-A: Rapid Experimentation and Analyses Fuels Rapid Marketplace Response
COVID-19 has been a catalyst for the explosion of analytics in the restaurant business. So many truisms are changing; which changes will stick?  Adjusting mix models to account for dramatic shock and long recovery in the baseline has been a tricky tour de force of analytics. Understanding how media might operate differently to support changing logistics is still a work in progress. While most restaurants have faced difficulties, some have had opportunistic success. This talk takes a look at the changes in analytics accelerated by COVID-19 and the variety of responses. Key takeaways include: Recovery in the restaurant business varies by many factors — what sort of analytics do we need now?  As service channels and dayparts flip — how should media adapt?  COVID is a stress test both advertising and modeling — what do we know so far about what analytics work?
Paul DiMaria — Marketing Effectiveness Lead, Chick-fil-A
Mark Garratt — Partner and Co-Founder, In4mation Insights

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OPTIMINE — Forget Everything You Thought You Knew: Adapting Attribution for the Pandemic & the Rapidly Evolving “New Normal” of Recovery- Lessons from the Front Lines
OptiMine shared case studies from several brands highlighting how radically changing consumer behavior, media preferences and performance have driven the need for highly agile measurement. OptiMine provided relevant, real-world examples for how models and measures can be safely and accurately adapted to capture the most current performance characteristics for sustained advantage during the pandemic and recovery periods, as well as critical measurement pitfalls to avoid.
Judd Eder — VP of Client Success, OptiMine
Jamie Glover — Director of Client Success, OptiMine