Discovering Digital Impact

Retail digital advertising typically draws from below-the-line spending buckets, so it behooves brands to account for their digital activity in a results-driven way. Considering that digital advertising is ephemeral, with messages appearing for a few fleeting seconds before disappearing, possibly forever, brands have struggled to create a “physical” record of their digital efforts that could then be analyzed.The Path to Purchase Institute saw this unmet need last year and quickly moved to address it, says Chuck Billups, managing director, strategic product development. “We saw an increase in digital advertising and collaborative marketing on retail sites,” he says. “Brands wanted to know where their money was really going.”In April 2012, the Institute fully launched OASIS (Online Advertising Survey & Insights Service), the first service to collect and organize information from retail digital media – everything from advertisements and collaborative marketing campaigns to sponsored content and even sweepstakes. The service crawls a wide variety of retail sites (18 leading sites in all) and pulls images of the pages that contain retail digital media. OASIS allows users to analyze the results based on a variety of factors, including how often and where the ads appear.According to Billups, it was essential for OASIS to address three specific issues:Brands want a physical record of ads or offers that they can go back to view. “Just being able to see something from six months ago was valuable,” he says.Brands also want to know where and in what context the ad or campaign appeared. OASIS captures the actual Web page so clients can see what content ran next to it, what category it was in and what the activation was designed to do – whether it was an e-commerce goal, for example, or an educational activation opportunity. Brands want to measure their competitors’ activity and share of voice across retail sites. “For example, has my competitor launched a new product online? Are they involved with my retail partner in ways I’m not?” Billups says.The Institute intends the OASIS information, first and foremost, to be analyzed at a high level, but brands can also drill down into particular ways they or their competitors are engaged with specific retailers.For example, OASIS recently looked at a brand that employed a top-down strategy in terms of managing digital media on retail sites, and also at a competitor of that brand that was employing a team-based, bottom-up strategy – meaning that individual customer teams ran the budgets and placements. “Through OASIS, you could see that the brand with the top-down strategy focused heavily on the biggest retail sites,” says Billups, “while the brand with the bottom-up strategy scattered its efforts among many sites.”So far, clients with a wide range of focus areas are taking advantage of the OASIS service, says Billups. “Shopper marketers are very interested, especially if they have created a digital shopper marketing function within their group.” Some clients are e-commerce focused because retail sites such as Walmart.com are considered an e-commerce channel, while others, particularly within CPG companies, are part of business competitive intelligence groups that provide insights to all organizational teams. Some retailers are also interested in finding out how brands are deploying retail digital media and on what sites.OASIS continues to make small development tweaks based on client input, Billups says. “One of the things to be implemented soon is a robust tagging function with which clients can tag with even more detail what kinds of ads they are, what they do activation-wise, and their contextual adjacencies. This will allow clients to define their own parameters and allow us to collect information for them in a really granular way.”As these charts indicate, the average number of sightings for Drugstore.com and Sam’s Club were consistently greater than those for all of the other retailer sites that OASIS monitors. Target, Walmart, Best Buy and Walgreens followed.Drugstore.com’s decrease in average appearances the week of May 26 is not due to ads not appearing, rather that they appeared less frequently. For example, appearances of ads from Bausch & Lomb’s Alaway decreased by 50%, while P&G’s Charmin dropped by 43%.There was an increase in sightings on Samsclub.com the following week, but it was unrelated to the Drugstore.com drop. The Sam’s Club increase was due to new brands being introduced as well as increases in existing brands.At Charmin’s peak in the line chart above, the ad pictured was found on Drugstore.com, leading shoppers to a product page. During that week, P&G’s Charmin and Bounty were the only paper products seen on Drugstore.com.At its peak, Bausch & Lomb’s Alaway was found on CVS, Drugstore.com and Walmart. Each ad redirected the shopper to Bausch & Lomb’s site to retrieve a coupon. The advertised coupon value was consistent on each site.The Lipton ad above was featured on Samsclub.com and led shoppers to a Unilever products microsite within Samsclub.com. During this peak, different ads featuring Lipton powdered drink mix products were found on Amazon.com, Drugstore.com and Target. May’s spike in Health is driven by Nutritional brands (including Pfizer’s Centrum and Caltrate; CytoSport’s Muscle Milk and Nestlé’s Power Bar), which made up 53% of the category during this time period. These ads appeared on Drugstore.com, Walgreens, Kroger, Target and Amazon.com with a “shop now” or online coupon/discount.25% of the Beauty category from April 29 to May 12 is attributable to Procter & Gamble’s Gillette Fusion, which had constant advertising throughout April, May and June. The spike to 12,000 in mid-May is due to an increase in advertising by Johnson & Johnson’s Neutrogena and Aveeno, and Energizer’s Schick.A sustained spike was seen in the Household category. This spike, aided by a jump in P&G’s Bounty and Charmin activity, occurred thanks to the addition of Reckitt Benckiser’s Woolite and Resolve ads on Drugstore.com. The latter two brands make up 35.5% of the advertising in the Household category from June 10-30.Feminine Products started on a rise beginning July 7. The increase is due to P&G’s Always and Tampax, which were not seen prior to July 7. Since July 28, J&J’s O.B. and Stayfree have added sightings to this category.Smaller manufacturers such as NeilMed’s Neti Pot entered the digital marketplace with a strong impact in Q2. Neti Pot ads were seen on Drugstore.com with a discount offer leading to a product page.The jump in sightings during Q2 for Reckitt Benckiser’s Air Wick was due to increased advertising on Drugstore.com and co-branded advertising with Dollar General. The ads and offers on each were different.The Q2 increase for Unilever’s Wish-Bone is a result of advertising on Kroger.com in addition to a co-branded Sam’s Club ad also featuring Unilever’s Lipton and Hellmann’s.P&G’s increased activity in Q2 can be attributed to the beginning of RDM Activity for its Charmin, Fusion, Dreft and Iams brands, as well as to increases in activity for Cascade, Dawn, Duracell and Head & Shoulders. Additionally, P&G’s commenced RDM Activity with Dollar General and eBay.The decrease in Kraft activity can be attributed to increased activity in non-food categories, which are not represented here.Since July, Dollar General has seen a decrease in private label activity, having lost ads that had been seen on category page tabs.The March increase in private label is attributable to increased sightings of Walgreens’ Nice! brand.

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