On a day when the papers were all reporting the IMF’s prediction of a paltry 0.5% annual growth in the world economy, it was fitting to open Media Research 2009 with a keynote address from a major global advertiser.  

What advertisers need from media research …

The company in question was Anheuser-Busch InBev, whose Director of Commercial Spend Effectiveness & Media, Johan Landmark, set out three key themes impacting upon the brewing giant’s advertising and media investment decisions.

Two of these took us down a well-trodden path: increasing pressure to prove the ROI of marketing spend in an era of fundamental and complex change to media and its consumption. But it was the third theme that was most revealing: data analysis.

Landmark explained that A-B InBev used three different econometric models of increasing focus “to connect cost and effect”:

• Industry model: What drives market growth/decline? By how much will the total beer market grow?
  
  
• Brand Allocation model: What drives brand market share? How much budget do we allocate to each country and brand?
  
  
• Lever Allocation model: How much budget do we allocate to commercial levers?

It’s the latter Lever Allocation model which houses the specific media