Rufus Evison, the new digital guy at dunnhumby spoke today at the eMetrics Summit in San Francisco on Deep Data Diving – Bringing Online & Offline Inline.
In the 45 minute slot he outlined a digital approach to analytics but with some offline examples, really making the audience think about how offline data can be used in the same way as we use it online.
Dunnhumby’s work with Tesco and the ClubCard is obviously a huge part of this. 13m people in the UK are on their list and if there are 26m households in the country, Tesco have an enormous amount of data to slice and dice.
Typically in the US coupon redemption is less than 1% but Tesco manages to convert 30-50% of coupons because they are so well targeted.
At a high level Rufus saw the analytics journey to financial nirvana as being a case of the flow between data, information and insight. The raw data, once we know the context, provides us with information and some robust analysis of the information with good controls, should in turn provide us with actionable insight.
The holy grail is seen as the achievement of three things:
- Linking ad exposure to customer purchase behaviour
- Understanding the effects of ALL advertising
- Know what people are planning to buy
Once cracked, those achievements should be measured in financial return. In fact he went so far as to say that “E-Metrics is dead, it should be called business metrics!”
After all why are we doing all this analysis? To increase sales for the most part...
But we have to be careful which data we take notice of. Not all online campaign research should necessarily result in the thumbs up for digital. He gave a great example of how a $7m TV campaign had created a 13% uplift in sales because it had crossed over to YouTube and gained a bit of viral love. A relatively quiet press campaign for the same product earlier in the year, had cost just $1.7m but only seen a 9% uplift in sales.
When they digged deeper into the data, the TV/online campaign uplift was with existing customers, while the press campaign had generated new buyers, resulting in a much more valuable life-time value number.
Just goes to show that digital is only part of the media mix. It’s proving of great value but should be seen in context. It’s the data analysis that proves its value positively or negatively for any given campaign.
One privacy question sprang to mind so I asked it:
“Are the 13m ClubCard holders in the UK aware that Tesco rifles through their shopping baskets every week, knows an awful lot about them and targets the coupons in order to get them to come back and spend more?”
Rufus was quick to answer that, “Pretty much all of Tesco’s customers know or understand why they are getting sent relevant coupons?”
Really?
Anyway bit of trivia: When people start buying nappies, Tesco sees an uplift in sales of cans of beer too!
Any ideas why?
