SAN FRANCISCO — Often, the end goal for a TV advertisement is to drive a consumer to purchase a product in a store. But what if the point of purchase was the start, not the end, of the whole strategy?
That’s a question IRI, a marketing data company, is posing to advertisers. Founded to capitalise on the advent of point-of-sale (POS) terminal scanners, IRI grew to ingest purchase data from consumer-packaged-goods retailers across the US.
At this point, it takes data from almost every POS transaction in the country, through knowledge of 350 million loyalty cards from 107 million households.
“We have multiple retailers in each household – it’s not just your grocery spend, but it’s your drug spend, it’s your specialty alcohol spend, it’s some of your club spend,” says IRI’s Nishat Mehta, in this video interview with Beet.TV.
What does that mean for brands? Mehta pitches that data as a chance to “measure whether or not they’re advertising actually worked, and what components of it worked best”.
Last year, IRI struck a deal with Alphonso, a company whose technology helps brands use internet-delivered TV advertising to spark interest – and track an actual offline purchase later down the line.
“We now have a panel of roughly about 14 million households for which we actually know their purchase behavior, and their television viewing behavior,” Mehta adds.
“That gives us an opportunity… to get down to the smallest of brands, to the fewest of exposures, to the lowest of frequencies, to the long tail of networks. Identifying …when (consumers) actually go to a store the following weekend to by their peanut butter, did the ad for Skippy actually have an impact? Is it that this household needs three views of the ad before it actually has an impact?
“Advanced TV certainly means that TV is not going anywhere soon.”
This video is part of a series produced in San Francisco at the RampUp 2018 conference. The series is sponsored by Alphonso. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
