- Company / Volvic
- Industry / Bottled Water
- Service / Marketing Mix Modeling
Danone Waters owns Volvic, the UK’s number-one bottled water brand. Working with Ipsos MMA, they turned conventional measurement wisdom on its head by getting granular digital marketing ROI from marketing mix modeling. This leaves them well-placed to know where to invest to grow, as they continue their mission of driving healthier hydration with consumers in the UK.
Challenge
At the time that Danon was seeking a marketing mix modeling solution, the growth in the bottled water drinks category was slowing and the competitive landscape was intensifying. Danone needed to work harder than ever to prove Volvic’s point of difference and continue to recruit people into the brand. With digital doubling its share of advertising budget from the prior year, the brand and insights teams needed to understand how all channels were working together to drive sales alongside trade promotions and distribution.
Historically, they would have turned to econometrics, which looks at weekly data for all factors over 2–3 years and teases out the impact of each factor on sales. However, such models struggled to provide actionable insight into digital media performance. Granular, well-labeled data was hard to obtain; and models were not sensitive enough to find a statistically significant impact for particular channels and tactics.
Solution
Ipsos MMA addressed the first problem by working with Google to get YouTube data by ad format, targeting type, device and region. Google had recently launched a Global Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) program with third-party econometrics vendors to provide such data (on YouTube, display, and search) and advice on how its ad formats work. Where possible, Ipsos MMA obtained similar data for other media.
In order to improve the sensitivity of the models, Ipsos MMA ‘pooled’ three years of weekly data across 9 UK sales regions and 5 sub-brands. This effectively boosted the data available for the model by 45 times, giving the model more statistical power.
Results
The results gave Danone a very clear picture of the drivers of overall sales and year-over-year changes. But unlike some models, the results gave a clear picture of digital media performance. It was clear that digital channels were ‘punching above their weight’ and delivering more sales than one would expect. For example TV delivered 48% of media-driven sales while consuming 63% of the budget (ratio of 0.77); while YouTube delivered 10% of sales from just 4% of budget (ratio of 2.28).
Econometrics usually doesn’t provide deep insight on digital performance. By working with Google to get granular data, and MMM from Ipsos MMA, we now have ROI for YouTube by brand, device and targeting type. We can see that it works, but more importantly, we can see where to focus next year to make it work even better.
Adrienne O’Brien | Volvic Brand Lead, Danone
