Better Customer Targeting Through Greater Understanding

Linda Dupree, CEO of Nielsen Catalina Solutions, has seen it all, research-wise from, as she noted, “Agency, advertiser and then research supplier.” Dupree and Chief Research Officer, Leslie Wood, have worked together for a long time and together they are a formidable force in the field of sales data analytics. 

Now, as Nielsen Catalina is about to celebrate its tenth anniversary, they have doubled down with efforts to further improve the measurement of CPG purchasing through the consumer funnel.

Measuring CPG on a More Sophisticated Level

Dupree believes that, “In an environment that is increasingly focused on outcomes, NCS is the sweet spot in the CPG market.” While her company initially started in the traditional forms of audience measurement, “increasingly we do targeting, optimization, and eventually we will move more into predictive measurement (applications).”

For Wood, who has been with NCS for eight years, “the company started with overall measurement and targeting and recognizing from the first, the incredible capacity and value of the data.” She added that even years ago, there were multiple sources for every piece of data which made it very useful to help track the consumer intent and journey. And with some of those sources of data overlapping, it was also possible to verify the data veracity. Some of the data comes from panels, some from set top boxes, some from shopping and purchasing data, some from outside suppliers of data and some from Nielsen. “These layers give you the understanding of what the biases are and the things that you don’t do well,” she explained and added, “and that has all formed a canvas which gave us the ability to go out and create so much richer understanding into how advertising works.”

New Products and Services

A range of services were established around all of this research because, as Dupree explained, “the quality of the underlying data resulted in a richness of insights derived from the data.” Technology has also added new tools to examine the data in new ways. “Data guides everything we do,” explained Wood. 

 Some of the new tools released from NCS include Slm, the Sales Lift Metric, which is delivered weekly for a campaign, “so that changes can be made in-flight,” Wood noted. “It gives us the ability to go in and look at what is going on across different tactics all at the same time,” and compare tactics to see what is and what is not working and then re-allocate. The ability to examine campaign efficiency to potentially deploy dynamic ad insertion gives Slm added value to advertisers.

A Changing Marketplace

“The market is looking for faster and better,” Dupree explained. Her team is focusing on that mandate as well as “growth in CPG in a world where consumers have a choice. Twenty years ago in CPG, there used to be about 7,000 items in a grocery store and now, 20 years later, there are about 50,000. (This is because) the types of variety (of consumer products) have changed so much.” This has resulted in much more competition in the CPG space. Marketers need to be sure that their money is being spent wisely and efficiently and results in sales impact.

“There is also an abundance of channels in the media world,” Dupree continued, “the shift in OTT and Linear and Addressable and VOD as well as other traditional channels like magazines and radio, we are awash in choice and that has been important for us to understand and measure.”

What Resonates in CPG

There are some challenges for CPG marketers in this new media environment and some are more focused on price rather than efficiency. But to Wood, this is not a trend across the board. “A lot of the stories about spending less,” Wood began, “may not be from national advertisers. There is a lot of spending from tiny brands where the budgets are very low. When you look at budgets of over a million dollars, it is a different story.”

According to Wood, the creative matters a lot in a campaign. But, as she explained, “The creative is the starting point. We are also seeing that the importance of the media decisions has increased a lot over the last few years.”  And Dupree noted,” There are also so many more levers to pull.” Media has gained in importance especially in regard to targeting. An advertiser would want to target brand loyalists but should also consider targeting non-users of a certain brand as well as users of a competitive brand. This will not only expand the potential customer base, it will also help to build the brand over time. “When you talk about the brand promise,” Wood stated, “it speaks to the essence of the brand and what the brand stands for. The interplay of media with targeting creative and how those people come together has been some of the richest findings we have had.”

Personalization is another big consideration so that the brands can, “meet the consumer where they are,” concluded Dupree, “especially through ad versioning.” All in all, the confluence of data driven advertising within the CPG world is resulting in not only better targeting of consumers but also a greater understanding of their needs, wants and concerns.  For Dupree, “We feel that we are in more of a dialogue with consumers and it is a much more personalized experience,” and that should greatly improve efficiencies by reaching consumers at the right time, in the right place and with the right messaging.

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

NCS's Leslie Wood on Monitoring Campaigns Using AI Causality

High on the wish list of most marketers is improving the measurement of campaign effectiveness. Fortunately, Leslie Wood, NCS's chief research officer, has been on a mission to perfect it. She has accomplished this with a combination of machine learning methodologies that interface with a campaign in flight, thus enabling marketers to modify and improve their ad placements in real time. This initiative, called Sales Lift Metrics, sheds light on the causal impact of specific campaign tactics by identifying the key sales drivers that amplify incremental sales for CPG brands.

"We have created a Super Learner, which includes multiple different machine learning methodologies, like 'random forest' and 'gradient boost,'" Wood said. "And when we execute the Super Learner, it runs all of those different models and sees which ones are winners — often up to three or four of them — and combines them into an ensemble model." It is apparently flexible enough to apply to any type of CPG advertiser and is constantly refining its application through the use of AI.

How It All Began
The idea and the efforts behind this initiative started about five years ago and, over that span of time, the methodology has evolved through testing and innovation. "When we first started, it was just television because you can't have a control if you have such high reach. After all, who is not exposed? People who were not exposed to the advertising look very different than TV viewers. They are very different kinds of people," she explained.

Wood discovered that this approach took the pressure off the researcher to constantly oversee the model. "Here was this machine learning method that allowed us to put this in places where data was siloed. We could set it up in 'free rooms,' places where there was no researcher," she said, adding that this allowed a door to open where Google, Facebook, and Apple could manage their proprietary datasets without a human interacting or overseeing it. "It is meant for computers to talk to computers."

In-Flight Optimization
Five years ago, the hardware just wasn't there to be able to apply in-flight optimization. But now, this can be executed on what Wood calls, "sales-lift metrics," which provides the ability to "use these machine learnings to quickly, in real time, deliver key performance indicators to tell you what about your campaign is working." It is now possible to compare multiple creative options, consumer targets, or sets of tactics for sales effectiveness and incremental causality.
"We are looking at the incremental value of each of them," she said, "and compare them" in a weekly cumulative sales report. An advertiser can make changes to the campaign as it rolls out and see the impact.

What Sets the Super Learner Apart?
"There is always a full set of statistics" within the Super Learner, Wood noted. This is unusual because "AI almost never has a full suite of statistics. Statistics were developed by professors on small data sets. For big data sets, we develop machine learning and AI methods and those were built by computer programmers. So, we don't usually have confidence intervals, significance tests, or standard error — those measures that you need to say that this is a good model. We built Super Learner, which does all of these steps."

In this way, as new machine learning methods are developed (and, according to Wood, they are being developed all the time), they are added to the system to see if there are new ways to improve campaign efficiency. "It allows us to continually improve without reprogramming or recoding," she said, adding that certain models never worked and others that worked too hard and delivered unreasonable answers. "We removed those."

Among the successful campaign indicators is incremental sales per household, which is a key performance metric. It also reports impressions delivery by target and by creative.

Going Forward
Since the Super Learner has the ability to integrate faster systems and new models, it advances every day. Thousands of new schedules have been run and rerun "to see what works and what doesn't work, what's the minimum threshold, what's feasible, what are indicators inside the statistics that let us know that it's not working."

Wood is committed to keeping up with "this fast-moving world" of data and machine learning with constant monitoring and asking why results change. In the fall, they will be adding more data, more brands, and a price/promotion feature.

And, according to Wood, this entire initiative has been a model for others. "We use the h2o machine learning language; they will tell you that we were the first to create a Super Learner and they followed suit and built one themselves," she said. "We have pushed the envelope on machine learning."

 This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

Nielsen Catalina's Leslie Wood: An Erwin Ephron Demystification Award Winner

If Leslie Wood had taken the same professional path as her parents, she would have been an artist -- a musician like her father or a dancer like her mother.  Instead, Wood is an artist of data and analytics.  She is currently the Chief Research Officer of Nielsen Catalina where she has established a strong reputation in branding and connecting consumer viewing behavior with purchasing activity.  Her out-of-the-box conceptual thinking has led to industry recognition as an ARF award recipient.  Wood (pictured above) is the first female to receive the prestigious Erwin Ephron Demystification Award, which was first established by the Advertising Research Foundation six years ago.

At the recent ARF conference, Wood and I discussed her current work, major initiatives and her "ah ha" moments.  "We've spent the last year and a half looking at how to build brands," she explained.  "A huge study with 50 brands and every measure we could find for a three-and-a-half-year period."  It is such a rich data set that it "will continue to bear fruit" going forward, she said.  Wood is also looking at long-term effects and the right way to measure them.

To do that accurately, "you need to go back at least one year," she noted.  "What we found, though, is that most people aren't willing to measure something over a year old.  'Oh, that campaign?  I'm done with that.  I want to know about this one.'  So, the focus here is, can we estimate the incremental?  It's all about making sure it is right and real."

Nielsen Catalina recently announced that they are measuring incremental sales with Google, building it in a walled garden and "using methods that have not been broadly used before because most tried and true measures require a researcher to be monitoring and you can't do that in a walled garden," Wood said.

Her team has also brought many new industry-wide products to market recently, including in-flight optimization, which is a new measurement methodology that she calls next-gen.  "It allows us to track campaigns in real time.  There are all kinds of products being developed out of that."
What led to the Erwin Ephron Demystification Award was Wood's brand work, which has pushed the limits of measurement and incorporated a range of different data sets.  "There was a core 'ah-ha' [moment]," she explained.  "We had all of this data, including advertising spend, which gave us not only the spend but also the share of voice.  We had from RMS price and promotion and features and store-level sales.  Then from our frequent shopper data, we had all of the measures of household level data, like repeat rates and purchase cycles, loyalty levels and things that require people-level data.  We have advertiser promotion and sales and put them together to look at. and included for every data set any measure that was standardly available."

But how is it possible to integrate all of these disparate data sets?  "When we looked at how those measures were related, they were all in different time frames," Wood admitted.  "Some penetration is past year -- sometimes the past six months like the purchase cycle.  Everything was a different measure.  Some were short-term and some were long and some right now."  To overcome that dilemma, Wood compiled every measure she had into two buckets -- four weeks and one year.  "Dollars is easy," she added.  "How many dollars in four weeks versus dollars in a year and as a rolling four weeks."

Then she did some correlations.  What "popped off the page" was that penetration has an 84% correlation with yearly sales.  "That is why the focus on penetration has been so strong," she noted.  But when she moved it to four weeks, the correlation rose further to 97% over the fifty brands.  What does that mean?  "That it is much more important to be thinking about getting buyers now, rather than only focusing on the people who didn't buy in the last year," she concluded.

This resulted in a new theory: Get your buyers now.  The more you can get now of any kind of consumer, the better off you will be.  "Advertising does best among current buyers," she explained.  "Maybe it's a shorter purchase cycle or maybe you have increased the repeat rate or increased loyalty. Use advertising for what it is really good at.  We know from our work that if you build loyalty and build repeat, you get the long term.  This drives both the short and long term." 

"Erwin was brilliant at picking some single point to focus on.  I picked one measure that I thought, 'Wow, if we really understood this piece it would give us a whole new way of thinking about how to do advertising," Wood said of the inspiration she carries with her from winning the Erwin Ephron Award.  Clearly, Wood's creative and novel way of analyzing data will continue to lead to award-worthy insights and game-changing applications.

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

Groundbreaking Cross Platform Initiatives

As with other parts of the industry, Research is undergoing transformative change brought on by the fragmentation of audiences and the proliferation of platforms and content choices. For those who are comfortable with change, it is a time to embrace new technologies to supplement traditional research methods. And the ARF Re!Think conference is one place where researchers can learn the new rules,  techniques and measurement solutions to remain on top of their game.

This year, the ARF presented more in the field of advertising dynamics in cross platform measurement. Jasper Snyder, EVP Research and Innovation Cross Platform, ARF, reported five “truths” gained from recent studies:

1.    --   Invest across platforms. Advertising across platforms delivers higher ROI. But almost a third of campaigns are taking place on only one platform.

2   - Combine traditional and digital media. There is a “kicker effect” when TV is added back to digital spending.

3.    -   The kicker effect also applies to millennials, who consume both traditional and digital media.

4.     -  There can be too much frequency in digital. Look to optimize digital by capping frequency.

5.     -  Unified creative is the way forward but be cognizant of the differences in platforms in crafting your message.

Cross platform measurement continues to be the Holy Grail for advertisers and media companies. Here are some highlights from the conference:

Advertising - CBS’s New ROI Paradigm

David Poltrack, CRO, CBS and President of CBS VISION, presented new research in conjunction with Leslie Wood, CRO, Nielsen Catalina Solutions in the area of purchase driven planning. “We are looking at the concept of ROI at CBS,” David explained, “and worked closely with Nielsen Catalina to find the right metrics and tools to assess the value of TV and cross platform advertising. We found a new planning paradigm called purchase driven planning to understand how media works and compare alternatives before they run. The result is incremental sales at the center of the ad run.”

Leslie spearheaded the study using as a foundation the data collected through Nielsen Catalina that combined the exposure of advertising to persons within households. She tracked transactional behavior across time to ascertain which people see what ads and how that changes their buying behavior. Leslie explained, “We monitored their exposure to the ad before they go to the store compared to what happened before they entered the store. This helps us ascertain what moved them to purchase events and when advertising could have an effect.” In this way, David and Leslie can estimate future behaviors against the recency of the advertising message.

Measurement - Nielsen Total Audience

Nielsen’s President of Product Leadership, Megan Clarken, presented Nielsen Total Audience, cross platform measurement. “Media consumption continues to rise,” she noted, “We spend over 64 hours a week on media with devices having profound effect.” While the industry measures television advertising using ratings, the combination of C3 / C7, time shifting behaviors, VOD and other device usage prevents the use of ratings in a cross platform setting.  “Total Audience is seeking to address that problem” she concluded.

According to Megan, Total Audience offers:
1. Measurement of audience usage and exposure across platforms.

2. Comparable measurement across the usage grid between linear and digital.
3. Measurement of ads separate and distinctive from other content
4. Creation of an all-inclusive ratings service focused around video, audio and text.

Conclusion

These are two of the many cross platform data initiatives presented at this year’s ARF Re!Think.  Other presentations included work in neuroscience to understand the role of creative; machine learning to clean up spam, help in image labeling and facilitate unrelated category search; and parsing the unique attributes of each platform to optimize consumer experiences. We are only scratching the surface of cross platform consumer behavior understanding. Enjoy the journey of discovery!

This article first appeared in www.Mediapost.com

Understanding the Sales Data Funnel. Q&A with Leslie Wood of Nielsen Catalina

Leslie Wood is a research veteran whose background in Telmar rep house, Ted Bates ad agency, ScanAmerica and consulting matches perfectly with her current role as Chief Research Officer for Nielsen Catalina Solutions. Although her parents wanted her to be an artist, Wood majored in mathematics. “I have always been about data and how to help people make better decisions” she explained.

In this fascinating interview, Woods talks about her work at Nielsen Catalina, the power of data in understanding the sales funnel, cross platform measurement, the fragmentation of choices in the market, trends in the industry and where the industry is heading five years from now.

There are four videos below with the following topics and lengths:

Subject                                                 Length (in minutes)

Background and Nielsen Catalina              (10:02)

Cognitive Analytics                                    (5:21)

Privacy and Predictions                              (8:50)

Data and Choice Fragmentation                 (10:14)

Charlene Weisler interviews Leslie Wood who talks about her career background and her work at NCS. This video is 10:02 minutes:

CW: What do you do now at Nielsen?

LW: I actually work for Nielsen Catalina Solutions which is a joint venture – half owned by Nielsen, half owned by Catalina. The beauty of how it was set up is that we have access to all of our parents’ resources. Anything they own, we can use. And in return, we divide our revenue 50/50. So it isn’t “for profit”; we divide our revenue and give it to our parents. That means that I have access to all of Nielsen’s assets which most people are aware of and I also have the Catalina assets – we have to have a separate agreement with all of the retailers, but what Catalina brings to the party is a server in every supermarket and every drugstore, every retailer that we connect to. Our agreement is that we are CPG (Consumer Product Groups) and we are in the U.S and that we will be on the watch side, the media side and the buy side. Anything that crosses those pieces is ours. My job has amazing resources.

What is Cognitive Analysis? Leslie Wood shares her views with Charlene Weisler in this 5:21 minute video:

CW: Tell me about your Cognitive Advantics Initiative.

LW: We have been using Ancova (analysis of covariance) as our methodology for measuring sales events – the effect of advertising on sales. Basically what you do is you take exposed households during the campaign and for every exposed household you find a matched unexposed household and you make them perfectly matched so all of their purchases in the prior year are lined up. So you are finding two people who are very similar.

CW: How do you match?

LW: The first criteria is buying – how did they buy for that past year. We also match demographics and race and media consumption and all kids of other pieces. But in television, when reach is high there isn’t a good group of unreached households. And they are different. They are not really your target and they are strange light TV viewers. So they are not representative and it is hard to find a good match. This is not a problem in digital. In digital we don’t have those kind of reach problems but in TV we do. We have been using other techniques and have decided that this is an opportunity to really step up.

So we created Cognitive Advantics and it has several key characteristics.  One is that it is a data mining technique that results in an answer after going through a rigorous process. It looks at the purchase occasion and for that occasion it looks back in time to see what happened prior to this purchase. How many TV exposures did I have? Or digital? Or digital and television? Or radio? Or all those things? What were all of the influences? Was it on deal? Was it on feature? Did you have a coupon? We have up to the moment of purchase. So we are looking at exposed versus unexposed but we are looking at them matching purchases that happened roughly at the same time with all of the same characteristics going back but you are only looking people who were exposed a week before or a month before or a quarter before. And that gives you the ability to find unexposed households. Ancova is able to take care of the issue around targeting. We create two models. One model is of exposure which models based on the likelihood you would be exposed to an ad based on your characteristics. It then models the likelihood of buying the brand and then puts it all together.

Charlene Weisler interviews Leslie Wood who talks about data and choice fragmentation in this 10:14 minute video: 

Looking ahead the next three to five years, Leslie Wood shares her predictions of the media landscape with Charlene Weisler in this  8:50 minute video:

CW: Where do you see the media landscape heading in the next three to five years?

LW: The world is changing and it will continue to change. We have amazing young people building amazing capabilities. I think consumers want connection to each other. They want entertainment. They want what they are engaged in to be a high quality experience. That can be on an iPad close up or a big screen. It’s all about what fits where somebody is in the moment they are. All media are evolving to be more consumer - centric to follow the consumer and meet the need of the consumer.