It's no secret CPG brands face a unique set of challenges that can make executing advanced media campaigns, well, difficult. A lack of first-party and person-level transaction data leave marketers in the dark, struggling to activate efficiently. Enter, the data clean room.
Clean rooms give CPG brands a solution to classic media activation challenges by allowing marketers access to unparalleled data and insights to create better-performing campaigns.
Many have likely heard of a data clean room, but haven't seen one in action. So, in a recent webinar with Circana, we had Epsilon's Senior Director, CPG Strategic Consulting and Audience Strategy, Chris Barnett, take us inside Epsilon Clean Room for a step-by-step overview of how to glean audience insights, build advanced audience segments, activate those segments and then measure campaign performance.
The story: Launching a new energy drink flavor
To make things more tangible, the demo follows a challenger energy drink brand that is launching a new juice flavored product. Like many CPG brands, they have some data collected through their website, email and a few promotional events—but they're still unsure which buyer segments to focus on for the launch of the campaign.
By leveraging Epsilon Clean Room along with Circana's transactional data, the energy drink brand can build custom models and analyses to pinpoint the most attractive segments for their launch.
Let's get started.
1. Uncover unique audience insights
The videos showcase Epsilon Clean Room's marketer-friendly UI.
To kick things off, the energy brand wanted to uncover which buyers purchased a product very similar to the juice flavored drink the brand was launching. This information was critical to better understand the buyers best positioned to like their new product.
The energy drink brand found:
- Competitor buyers: Using Epsilon Clean Room and Circana transaction data, the brand was able to see who else was buying juice flavored energy drinks in real time.
- Demographics: These buyers tended to be younger, lower income and located in the south and west U.S. regions.
- Interests: They were also mobile gaming enthusiasts, DIY-ers and professional wrestling fans.
2. Advanced audience segmentation
Now that the energy drink brand learned who was in the market for their new product and what interests them, they could use models and custom analysis insights to zero-in on who to message about their new product launch.
In the previous video, we saw the energy drink brand find competitive buyers. To take it a step further, the brand used Epsilon Clean Room to find out who the high and medium spenders were in that competitive list. After doing so, they found the buyers to be:
- Higher income
- Location skewed toward the US midwest
- College-aged
- Interests included taking road trips
With that level of detail, the energy drink brand had a clear view of the five audiences most likely to buy their new drink flavor:
- Mobile game enthusiasts
- Road trip takers
- College students
- DIY-ers
- Professional wrestling fans
They could also look at the overlap between those five activation audiences and see which categories were driving the most growth to prioritize depending on budget. Any guesses? Turns out mobile game enthusiasts, college students and road trip takers were driving the most growth and had the highest propensity to be a brand switcher.
At this point you might be thinking, "Finding new customers is great. But how can I get more value out of my existing ones?" CPG brands often lack transactional data for the buyers in their CRM list that make this ask difficult—but with Epsilon and Circana's data, brands can fill in the gaps by enriching the first-party data they do have to figure out who is buying competitor brands.
3. Activate those audiences
The energy drink brand successfully built advanced audiences and was ready to activate their launch campaign. Inside Epsilon Clean Room, the CPG could push the audiences downstream to their media partners across:
- Display
- Online Video
- Audio
- Connected TV
- Addressable TV
To expand their reach even further, the energy drink brand used Epsilon Clean Room's activation tool to create lookalike audiences. Our lookalike modeling tool has a simple slider to control the confidence level. In this case, the brand had an audience of 26M people, which was more than their budget could reach—but by adjusting the 90% default confidence level to 93%, the brand built a more accurate audience of 8.5M people.
4. Measure performance
After the launch, the energy drink brand was able to understand how many of the users exposed to the launch campaign actually purchased their new product within the last 30 days.
The brand was also able to see which audiences performed the best of the different ones they activated. Within the people that had purchased in the last 30 days, 21% were mobile enthusiasts, 13% were DIY-ers and 10% were college students.
This level of insight a clean room provides can help marketers understand what's working and what's not, and optimize based on those trends.
With Epsilon Clean Room, the possibilities are endless
With little-to-no first-party data, the energy drink brand was able to understand their customers at a granular level, build advanced audiences, activate those audiences and measure their performance—all in a clean room. Pretty awesome, right?
That's why with Epsilon Clean Room, the ultimate audience insights tool, the possibilities really are endless. CPG brands can expect:
- A 360-degree view of customers and prospects that includes demographic, lifestyle and transaction data.
- Current, detailed insights that identify and cultivate new, high-growth customers with predictive modeling based on a brand's best customers. This also increases the understanding of current customers, driving better retention strategies.
- More efficient campaign performance executed through direct-media activation partners, including Epsilon Digital, with higher data fidelity.
- Accurate and persistent cross-channel measurement, on both owned and paid channels, that measures effectiveness of media spend (reducing ad waste).
- Micro-segmentation capabilities that identify niche audiences ready for activation and measurement.
No matter how much or little data a brand has, Epsilon's clean room solutions find and connect them with the best unique in-market prospects through use of top-notch, privacy-protected consumer data.
If you want to watch the full webinar to learn more, click here.
