sparc_whitepaper_2016

© 2016 Sparc Media Pty. Ltd.
Why successful businesses need to adopt an
information and insights-fuelled marketing strategy
A white paper by Sparc Media - March 2016

© 2016 Sparc Media Pty. Ltd. p.2Information and insights-fuelled marketing strategy - white paper
1. Introduction
2. What is information?
3. What is information and insights-fuelled marketing?
4. What is the problem with the current status quo?
5. Information and insights-fuelled marketing vs. data-driven marketing
6. How information and insights-fuelled marketing can help you
7. Using dashboards to drive information and insights-fuelled marketing
8. Case Study - A leading food and recipe website
9. Key learnings
10. About
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CONTENTS

1. Introduction: Are you ready for the shift to
information and insights-fuelled marketing?
Marketing is moving towards a completely digital-driven function
and with it the complexities are increasing. Over the next few years
almost all daily content people consume will become digitally-
driven. While this era offers significant opportunities, it also presents
challenges around attribution, creative, ad delivery, data translation,
and the transformation of media buying through the fast adoption of
programmatic media buying, to name a few.
Digital marketing is now so far ahead that it has become the next
traditional form of marketing. As digital advertising has evolved,
programmatic, or automated media buying, has rapidly evolved
with it, achieving significant growth in the short time it has been
around. With higher ROI through better targeting and optimisations,
programmatic media buying continues to be adopted rapidly with
44 percent of marketers expecting to increase their programmatic
advertising budgets in 2016. Australia has the second highest
programmatic penetration in the world at 46%.1
.
Marketers are being driven by data. Spending on data analytics is
rising by 30 per cent a year and is forecast to reach $US114 billion
($AU147.6 billion) by 2018, according to global consulting firm AT
Kearney, but only one in 12 companies is achieving a satisfactory
return on its investment2
.
The challenge is how to translate that data into information.
There are so many data sets; many of them sitting in isolation
unlinked, resulting in decisions being made based on specific
pieces of data rather than a holistic view. Marketers need a high-
level view to make decisions not just on data, but on information
and insights derived from data. These knowledge based decisions
include an understanding of how every channel in the marketing
supply chain is reacting with each other to achieve the ultimate
payout.
Information and insights-fuelled marketing will be the essential
weapon in the arsenal of future marketing leaders. Data will
transform decision making, creating a far more sophisticated way
of extracting information and insights from all marketing, research
and media activities. The data is analysed and extrapolated in near
real-time and transformed into information and actionable insights
to make on-the-fly, smarter business decisions.
This shift to information and insights-fuelled marketing can have a
direct positive impact on your marketing ROI.
In this white paper, Rohan Mehrotra, Global Trading Director at
Sparc Media, explains the concept of “information and insights-
fuelled marketing” to help you prepare for the next big innovation
in the industry.
1 Source: Magna Global Programmatic 2015 Roadmap for Growth.
2 Retailers urged to do better on Big Data, SMH.com.au, March 15, 2016.
2. What is information?
Information is data translated. It is derived from data but not
limited to it. In the current context information is not necessarily
only derived from the data at hand but includes a wide variety of
things such as market trends, current affairs and PEST (Political,
Economical, Social and Technological) information.
Using this information we can derive insights and use a culmination
of both to drive effective and efficient business decisions.
When leveraged to its full potential, information and
insights-fuelled marketing will help you:
1. Understand your customers better.
2. Maximise your marketing and media budgets.
3. Make smarter business and marketing decisions.

3. What is information and insights-fuelled
marketing?
Essentially, It is a way of syphoning out the right information
and insights from all of your marketing (and research) channels.
Establishing which information and insights are needed and which
are redundant, then having the tools to make decisions based on
the most important information and insights, in real-time.
It can be employed by anyone in marketing, from small businesses
to the ASX 100. It is less about resources and more about setup,
structure and agility. The outcome can be extremely beneficial
because it allows you to quickly identify which parts of your
marketing spend are actually working so that you can make quicker
and more effective decisions.
4. What is the problem with the current status
quo?
The biggest challenge that marketers face today is their ability (or
inability) to ingest and utilise data coming from their marketing mix
and react to it in real-time. Everyone has access to so much data,
information, insights and statistics, but very few could answer with
confidence:
1. Which of my campaigns are working?
2. What data should I be reacting to and what should I be
ignoring?
3. What are the small insights that will transform my business?
4. What is giving me a return on investment for my marketing
spend?
5. What is going to waste money?
Even with many technological advances, analytics and tools,
marketers are still rubbing their heads over the John Wanamaker
problem.
Information and insights-fuelled marketing refers to
marketing and business decisions that are driven by
information and insights (effective and translated)
derived from both big and small data.
“I know half the money I spend on advertising is
wasted, but I can never find out which half.”
John Wanamaker, Retailer, Considered the Father of Modern Advertising

5. Information and insights-fuelled marketing vs.
data-driven marketing
Data-driven marketing uses a wide variety of data points to identify,
understand and target individuals. Marketers (and sometimes
insight managers or analysts) review data from Data Management
Platforms (DMP), social media, CRMs, advertising, marketing and
surveys in silos.
This approach ends up compartmentalising each process of
targeting, marketing and media buying by their different mediums,
technologies and players in the market. This forces marketing
managers and senior marketing teams to delve into each channel
and tactic, resulting in a more “micro-view” of the market than
necessary. This micro perspective, coupled with terms such as
Digital Out of Home (DOOH), Demand Supply Platform (DSP),
Demand Management Platform (DMP) etc, results in a lot of
unnecessary confusion in the marketer’s mind.

Data is extremely important and is the basis from which we should
work. We need to leverage data to be able to target audiences and
help inform the overarching strategy. Information and insights
is the selection of the right data translated into the most
powerful information and insights required by marketing
and other departments to fulfil objectives.
The difficulty with the way that media is bought now is that
typically you will only receive baseline data from your agency e.g.
impressions, clicks, views, CTRs, and that report will be sent some
time after the campaign has finished. From your own business you
might also receive sales, social, SEM, SEO and research data.
The difficulty here is that there is too much to translate yourself and
respond to in real-time.
Instead of cross referencing multiple spreadsheets you need to
start seeing that data aggregated into one viewpoint, then you
need a specialist to turn it into insights, because frankly, who has
the time to do this themselves?
From your media buy, instead of knowing your CTRs, impressions,
etc, what you truly want to be learning are things like:
• What were the audience segments I reached and how did
they respond to my media?
• What are their interests?
• Which messages appealed to which audiences?
• Is my customer that costs me $10 to target, of higher lifetime
value to me than my customer that costs me $4 to target?
• Which of my audience segments respond best to which
channel?
• How long does it take me to convert a customer through
digital marketing?
Ideally you want this information in visual format, such as graphs so
that you can actually paint a picture and connect the dots.
On a recent advertising campaign we ran for a client we found that
women, expats and Japanese students were the highest engagers
with their messaging. This is an insight that you can action quickly.
Targeting expats is much easier when you have identified that they
are your target audience, and knowing that Japanese students are
also responsive means that you can run ads in Japanese to that
audience and skew the creative to them, resulting in increased
engagement levels.
6.Howinformationandinsights-fuelledmarketing
can help you
This information helps you quickly identify which parts of your
marketing spend are actually working so you can shift your media
buying and marketing strategies accordingly.
Information and insights-fuelled marketing shortens the supply
chain and reduces the number of nodes between the data and the
end decision maker(s). This means getting translated data to the
decision-maker faster, equipping them with vital knowledge about
how the market is interacting with a campaign.
When undertaking an advertising campaign, a supplier will rarely tell
you what hasn’t worked. Instead you will be presented with Click
Through Rates (CTR’s) and all of the positive data points. Shifting
your mindset and understanding that media can drive insights for
your entire business will allow you to learn what doesn’t work too.
This not only helps us come closer to a solution to the Wanamaker
problem but makes the whole problem obsolete. Why? Because
marketers are quickly able to find out what’s working and what isn’t.
This is not a waste. Knowing that budget was spent on an audience
segment that didn’t interact well with your messages, creative or
product, provides valuable information about your target audience
and reasons why the campaign didn’t resonate. These insights,
combined with other information, allow you to make changes to
To maximise your Marketing ROI, you need:
a) the information coming to you in a quicker time frame.
b) the data to be already translated into information and
insights, so that you can take action on it.
Information and insights-fuelled marketing provides
greater benefits to the marketer by combining multiple
data points and insights to drive intelligence.

the messaging or to stop targeting an audience segment that isn’t
driving good ROI.
Armed with this information your new challenge is how to action
what you have learned. This is the crux of information and insights
fuelled marketing. Imagine if tomorrow you could learn
which 50% of your budget wasn’t working and you started
investing that spend into the right areas - you could double
your ROI overnight.
Business inefficiencies can cause unnecessary wastage. But if
marketers compare their marketing and media buying chain to a
product supply chain, the quicker they will find those inefficiencies
and reduce them.
Therefore, the problem marketers are unknowingly faced with is
how to make their marketing supply chain work for them. Budgets
are wasted when decisions can’t be made due to a lack of small
and big data, or when that information is there, but no decision is
made on it.
For example, information from your media buy execution (via
supplier or trading desk) is not being sent to you quick enough
because of lengthy processes, poor understanding of technology
and inability to forward data in legible formats.
7. Using dashboards to drive information and
insights-fuelled marketing
The assumption here is that each level in the marketing supply
chain is doing its best to optimise the outcomes for the end client
and themselves.
Having the right information and insights highlight the importance
of a holistic view – the introduction of a singular dashboard
that allows clients to integrate all their data in one place
and to visualise the information.
Pulling information from offline and online marketing efforts into
one place allows the marketer to effectively make more valuable
decisions on what is providing the most positive ROI for their
business. Things such as brand uplift and brand equity indexes
that show how people perceive a brand online vs offline should also
be included. The result is effective integration of online activities to
foot traffic and actual sales.
This is information and insights-fuelled marketing not data driven
marketing (which is a subset of information and insights-fuelled
marketing).
To increase business output and get these results in
real-time you should seek an integrated and strategic
alignment with the media buyer who will feed this
information into an overall dashboard along with
information from your other activities.
Marketing needs to be more fluid.
• 69% of participants said they would consume
more marketing data if they had more time to
analyse it.
• 66% of participants agreed they would consume
more marketing data if they could see it all in one
place.
• 89% of participants felt it is important to see
marketing data from all sources in a single
dashboard.
Source: Domo’s Data Driven Marketing Survey 2013
By pushing all the data in one place, marketing managers
and senior management are able to use information
and insights to make decisions on a business level not
just a campaign or channel level.

Dashboards -Your marketing, media and sales data can be collected into one place which is crucial for insights
to be extracted and actions to be taken quickly.
8. Case Study
A leading food and recipe website
The marketing team of a leading food website wanted to launch
their new site to market. They felt their web audience was 50+
years old, 95% per cent female and interested in food and cooking.
As a result of this assumption, the website content was focused
heavily on hearty recipes and cakes that appealed to that audience
segment.
Campaign Objectives:
• Increase brand awareness
• Drive visitation to the website
• Drive visitation from individuals who will become repeat visitors
Results:
• Over 15M impressions served over 2 months
• Retargeting yielded a strong CTR of 0.13%
• Dynamic retargeting proved very effective for driving repeat
visitation (CTR 0.10%) with over 1,069 clicks
• CPC came down to an average of $0.78
From using Sparc Media’s information and insights-fuelled
marketing tools, the client was able to uncover insights that
steered them to a completely new audience:
• The highest ad engagement came from 20-35 year olds
• The audience was actually 70 percent female / 30 percent
male.
• After their main interest in cooking, the audience was
interested in health and fitness topics which led us to infer that
they would be interested in healthy recipes.
How these insights positively affected their business:
With these information and insights, the business was able to
realise that their assumed target audience was much broader
than they originally thought. In fact they had unlocked a whole new
audience.
The team took this information and insights and redeveloped their
website content toward a younger audience, making sure it was
suitable for both males and females. They featured healthier content
and recipes that resulted in more relevant content, truly catering to
their actual audience, not their assumed one. This drove up site
engagement and reduced bounce rates.

9. Key learnings
The key learnings from this white paper are:
1. Data-driven marketing and information and insights-fuelled marketing are not the same.
The latter translates data into a format that is already analysed and is easily actionable so that you can make those
small decisions that will change your business outcomes on the fly, as opposed to being in a format that cannot be
processed quickly.
2. Start knowing what isn’t working - the data is already there...
It just needs to be harnessed and translated. Don’t just look for the successful results, but also the things that are not
working and extract insights from these. This combination will lead to better results for your business.
3. Look at removing inefficiencies from the marketing supply chain...
(YES, that is exactly what it is, a supply chain) and bring them closer to your product supply chain.
Rohan Mehrotra
Rohan Mehrotra is Global Trading
Director at Sparc Media.
Rohan is a programmatic pioneer and
evangelist. Having 13 years experience
in business strategy as well as tenure
at Cadreon and Sparc Media, he has
led the strategy and buying for many of Australia’s most prolific
brands. His experience has helped major brands and agencies
transform their marketing results by integrating programmatic
media buying as a key part of their marketing operations.
Rohan’s passion is in helping businesses to grow and truly
understand their media and marketing data, as well as making
programmatic accessible to all. Rohan also competes in Ironmans
and Marathons.
About Sparc Media
Sparc Media is an insight driven advertising company. Partnering
with clients, the team of experts use data and technology to deliver
strategic programmatic advertising that solves business objectives.
Sparc Media is a Pureprofile company headquartered in Australia
and offers solutions to brands and agencies.
www.sparcmedia.com
Sparc Media aims to grow clients business through data
and insights-fuelled marketing.
For more information about how Sparc Media can grow your business, or for a complimentary
training session on programmatic media buying, contact info@sparcmedia.com

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