Nielsen enables robust sales ROI measurement for digital spends

Since 2014, ad spends in India have grown 12%-15% CAGR. In this period, India is the only large market where all media, traditional and digital, have grown with digital growing upwards of 30% CAGR. While traditional media has been holistically evaluated for the FMCG industry up until now, robust sales ROI measurement for digital spends has been lacking. To bridge that gap, Nielsen India has launched Custom Mix Modeling (CMM) in India, which is a traditional trade heavy market. This solution will help FMCG advertisers measure sales ROIs of individual digital publishers using the same method as for TV and Print.

Nielsen’s Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) solution has been helping advertisers optimize their marketing spends globally. However, in traditional trade heavy markets such as India, retail sales offtake data for FMCG is available at monthly intervals. The lack of weekly sales offtake data for building MMMs has led to a gap in robust evaluation of digital media vis-a-vis traditional media. This is because digital investments are more recent and more discontinuous in nature, and require more granular data for measurement.

Nielsen’s solution to this challenge is the Custom Mix Modeling – launched with a retail panel of traditional trade outlets to collect sales data from sampled stores on a weekly basis. The weekly retail panel was launched in 8 major metros for 100+ brands across 16 FMCG categories. Nielsen uses their globally accepted MMM technique on the weekly offtake trends to provide sales ROI measurement across all traditional and digital media.

Read more: Nielsen expands ad measurement on YouTube’s mobile app to India

With the CMM solution, apart from the impact of media platforms on sales, Nielsen will be able to provide the industry with benchmarks for digital ROI insights. Furthermore, with this solution Nielsen can set up quick tests that evaluate sales impacts of different creatives, ad formats, and placement decisions at a sales ROI level.

“We, at Nielsen, identified the absence of an industry-wide standard solution to measure sales ROI of all media with the same granularity and rigor even while the share of digital ad expenditure is increasing rapidly in India. This gap was making it difficult for brands to make investment decisions for all platforms based on proven outcomes", said Dolly Jha, Head - Media, Nielsen South Asia. "This solution that we have created can help FMCG marketers and advertisers with insights at multiple levels on a medium that is today almost 20% of the total media portfolio. This will directly aid in media planning, in turn helping advertisers gain overall efficiencies on media investments.”

Nielsen is working closely with leading FMCG players, and Mondelez India is one of the first of several advertisers to have successfully deployed CMM in planning and optimizing their media mix.

Talking about CMM, Anil Viswanathan, Marketing Director (Chocolate), Mondelez India said, “CMM will not only solve for a long-standing challenge regarding sales ROI measurement for digital on offline retail brands, but will also prove to be a key input into an industry-wide discourse on the standardization of effectiveness measurement”.

Welcoming the development, Pratham Hegde, Head of Marketing Science, Facebook India said, “We congratulate Nielsen on the successful launch. The CMM initiative finally settles the debate around marketing evaluation for FMCG by focusing on outcomes that marketers want, instead of an endless list of input metrics. We now have a common-currency to measure effectiveness of each digital publisher along with TV and other media, allowing advertisers to allocate budgets scientifically”.