NEW YORK: PepsiCo has benefitted from tapping automated analytics when developing brand messaging for some of its leading beverage lines.

Nick Graham, Senior Director/Insights at PepsiCo's Global Beverage Group, discussed this topic at the Advertising Research Foundation's (ARF) Re!Think 2016 conference.

More specifically, he outlined how working with firms like ZappiStore, an automation solutions provider for market research, has enabled the organisation to iterate at speed.

"The fact that you can test so many more times in the process actually does make for better creative work," said Graham. (For more, including further tips about using this approach, read Warc's exclusive report: PepsiCo dives into automated marketing analytics.)

Drilling down into this subject, he suggested this kind of automated analysis offers more granular insights than have traditionally been achieved by copytesting.

"When we've typically used this [kind of service]," Graham said, "we actually do get to better work at the end, because you're testing at each creative stage.

"You can test multiple times at the animatic stage. You can test multiple times at [the] final edit."

As a result, this approach helps marketers avoid making an "arbitrary decision" early in the process, and instead use automated tools for "creative territory development", continued Graham.

"Before you even spend your $10,000 on the animatic, you know it's a winning idea. And, from that point on, it's just about refining it," he stated.

Alongside representing a "cost-effective" solution, the advantages thus extend significantly beyond economics alone.

"Whether it's within the scope of an existing piece of a campaign ... or when we're churning out content on a much more regular basis, we wouldn't necessarily be able to test all of that," Graham said.

"It means we can then test a huge range of things. Even if it doesn't affect a particular piece of copy, you build up a database of learnings over time."

Data sourced from Warc