January 2020 – Analyx

London; January 19, 2020: Analyx®, a European leader in Marketing ROI decision support, today announced that it had joined the Nielsen Connected Partner Program. The partnership will enhance Analyx’ agile marketing budgeting solution SpendWorx®. By leveraging the power of Nielsen data, consumer-package goods (CPG) companies can use SpendWorx® now even more effectively to regularly optimize marketing spendings across countries, brands, product groups and channels.

Since 2017 Analyx® has been driving the success of its SpendWorx® solution and has served industry leaders, e.g. in Laundry, Beer, Cosmetics, Insurance, Banking and Telecommunication with its innovative approach to enhance their Marketing ROI. Combining short-term marketing impact and long-term brand impact in one software, SpendWorx allows to optimize the impact of global advertising spendings holistically and to enable customers to access all critical information in a user-friendly frontend.

“Clients expect the smartest and fastest-to-impact solution to enhance their marketing ROI, which allows them to adjust their budgets timely in an ever-changing marketing reality,” says Claudio Righetti, CEO at Analyx®. “The partnership with Nielsen is an important step for us to reduce set-up and update times across the comprehensive footprint of Nielsen. With POS and media tracking data being two crucial data sources for SpendWorx®, Nielsen clients will be able to measure, analyze and decide faster and smarter than before.”

The Nielsen Connected Partner Network enables companies to work with trustworthy, innovative partners, who deliver results aligned to the way your business measures success. Built on the concept of an open ecosystem that uses Nielsen data as connective tissue, the Connect Partner removes the burdensome barriers of sharing data so you can shift from managing data to doing things with it. With your data connected, you will be able to measure, analyze and decide faster – and smarter – than ever before. Since the program’s launch, the Nielsen Connected Partner Program has successfully to the largest network of curated third parties providing data and services to CPG companies. Today it is a community of over 50 partners that include companies such as Periscope by McKinsey, So1 and ShopAdvisor.

ABOUT Analyx®

Analyx® is a European leader in Marketing ROI decision support with offices in Poland, Germany and the UK. It has served 10 of 30 DAX companies in recent years making advanced data science common business practice in the CMO office leaving user-friendly tools behind. It combines the benefit of an experienced data analytics team with the required strategic insights of industry-experienced consultants. Its ultimate aim is to empower their senior clients to arrive at better investment decisions – unbiased and agile. If you like to learn more about SpendWorx® and Analyx®, please visit: www.analyx.com. Or write to info(at)analyx.com.

ABOUT NIELSEN

Nielsen Holdings plc (NYSE: NLSN) is a global performance management company that provides a comprehensive understanding of what consumers watch and buy. Nielsen’s Watch segment provides media and advertising clients with Total Audience measurement services for all devices on which content—video, audio and text—is consumed. The Buy segment offers consumer packaged goods manufacturers and retailers the industry’s only global view of retail performance measurement. By integrating information from its Watch and Buy segments and other data sources, Nielsen also provides its clients with analytics that help improve performance. Nielsen, an S&P 500 company, has operations in over 100 countries, covering more than 90% of the world’s population. For more information, visit www.nielsen.com

MROI means Marketing Return on Investment – or in other words: Which impact do the financial resources put into marketing have on sales? This might sound like dry mathematical finance, but it is worthwhile for every CMO to engage in this topic for two reasons:

The term brings the idea of marketing as an investment in (future) turnover into focus – just as an investments into R&D – this alone is already a value in itself!
The budget of CMOs that do not consider their MROI will always be vulnerable: If marketing can’t proof its ROI, it remains a pure cost center!

Nevertheless, the challenge of a clean MROI measurement is in most cases the following: Everything happens at the same time. See figure 1 for illustration: What can the observed increase in sales in the highlighted month be attributed to? Your media spending? The raise of your promo intensity? Maybe it was the price reduction? Or maybe in the end, it was a factor outside of your company’s control, like e.g. a moment of weakness of your competitors or a rainy month that lead customers to the malls instead of the beach?

MMMs learn from the developments of the past. Since no past month equals another, modern statistics can identify patterns in the data and isolate the actual effects of particular marketing activities or media channels. This way, you can find out how strongly for example TV advertisement directly impacts sales in the short run and if this effect is reinforced by simultaneous online advertisement. In order to carry out a clean measurement of MROI one cannot evade statistic models. For the most part, these are referred to as Marketing Mix Models (MMMs) and in principle they do the following (see figure 2): they determine the correlation between “x” – various contemporaneously acting factors influencing sales – and the performance variable “y”, thus e.g. the development of sales over the course of the past years.

An in-house data science department is not necessarily needed to implement MMMs as there are sophisticated software solutions and service providers with a strong focus on consulting and supporting organizations in this process. In addition, the frequently expressed concern of models being a methodological “black box”, which someone needs to trust rather blindly, can be dispelled – quite the contrary: Good MMMs leave you with a transparent view of the underlying principles applied to determine the effectiveness of marketing activities.

But no MMM can work without data – both for “x” as well as “y”. Typically, at least data for the past 2-3 years on a weekly basis is required – the more data and the more granular, the better the models. MMMs solely work on aggregated data (per day, per week, per month), and there is no need for consumer-level data let alone personal information like names of individuals – good news in times of GDPR. Some of the data needed can even be obtained from public sources or panels, but e.g. your historical spending is best known to organizations themselves. The (very) pleasant side effect of a comprehensive MMM project therefore is the collection and cleaning of a database of marketing and sales data in one place, which otherwise would be scattered in silos across the organization or even saved in hard-to-handle formats like PDFs.

And the payback of the initial investment for an MMM project is demonstrated to be worthwhile: For who knows the correlation between “x” and “y” is able to adjust future marketing spending to move things in the right direction – independent scientific sources verify a potential increase in MROI of 10-30%.

Month: January 2020

Analyx® Offices