NEW YORK: PepsiCo, the fast-moving consumer goods manufacturer, gained new insights into the impact of digital campaigns through working with research firm IRI on a project that delivered results at speed.

Beth Bubon, Analytics Director at PepsiCo's North America Nutrition Group, discussed this subject at the Advertising Research Foundation's (ARF) 2017 Audience Measurement Conference.

More specifically, she referenced an initiative, undertaken with IRI, which helped PepsiCo rapidly acquire a fuller perspective on the impact made by its digital communications.

"We need to have a tool – and a methodology – to get more granular in the way we look at our digital campaigns," said Bubon. (For more details, read WARC's exclusive report: PepsiCo digs deep: Who makes up a digital audience?)

Alongside establishing the correct mix of creators and ad types, Bubon stated, "We wanted to know, by publisher, where we were going to get the most bang for our buck."

One example of the insights gleaned from PepsiCo's analysis with IRI concerned a campaign that "saw pretty strong lifts across all publishers".

Digging down into the figures, however, revealed opportunities for PepsiCo to optimize its spend in order to generate a stronger return on investment.

"When you look at the cost per impression, we felt really good about Publisher 3 and Publisher 4, [with] lower cost per impression, and then higher lifts. But we didn't feel so good about Publisher 5. Although the lift was fairly strong, the CPM was high and the return on adspend was just not very good for that publisher."

At an even more granular level, the company was able to understand precisely which segments responded better to the campaign.

"We wanted to be able to understand. from a granularity standpoint, what targeting method was performing best," said Bubon. "In this case, we saw a strong performance from our demo-, purchase-based, Hispanic [cohort].

"When we dug further into the Hispanic target group, we were able to look at lift by ad type and by creative. In this case, we saw a stronger lift within our video versus our standard banner. And, within the grid, we actually saw fairly similar lifts around our static and end data."

Data sourced from WARC