Data to deal with the pressure (and the questions) about 2023 Marketing budgets

It's a classic. In an economic environment where uncertainty and fear of a possible recession predominate, marketing budgets are under scrutiny and marketing teams face a lot of pressure. To justify spend dedicated to large cross-media campaigns that incorporate media such as TV, Connected TV, video or audio on demand, or social networks, it is essential to be equipped with data-solutions that help you in three ways. Let's take a look.

1. Eliminate inefficient expenses: in times of crisis, carrying on doing the same things out of inertia, with no measurement to ensure they are working, is no longer a viable option. At FLUZO we are optimizing our clients' budgets by detecting media plan inefficiencies -such as excessive frequencies or media outlets that do not generate the desired reach for the target they aim to impact considering the spend- and locating areas of opportunity for those allocations.

The result? Many of our customers have been able to optimize as much as 20% of their budget.

In addition, having a single metric for all media, allowing the comparison of any campaign for any brand or product, will provide a comprehensive perspective to much more quickly detect where inefficiencies are occurring, also within the organization itself and in its different marketing initiatives.

2. Reporting: With media hyper-fragmentation, the reporting of a cross-media campaign has become a puzzle of metrics that is very difficult for a finance professional - or even a media specialist - to understand.

This situation poses two major problems: the first is that with this data, it is very difficult to draw conclusions that can be used to improve planning in the future. The information, the result of data mergers or mix modeling, comes long after the campaign is over and ends up being more of a corporate box to check than a productive operational exercise.

The second issue is that interactions between marketing and corporate management become confused, unproductive, and full of unanswerable questions as a result of the information's late arrival and complexity. But right now, the opposite is required.

This is how a senior Diageo executive, Sophie Kelly, explained it at a recent event reported in the Wall Street Journal. “As CMOs, our job is to continue to reinforce the value we get from spend. And the only way to do that is to really understand the business and to have a business conversation about the value that we’re spending and what it’s going to put back.”

Along the same lines, Janet Ballis, head of services for CMOs at EY, explains in an article in Harvard Business Review, “under the stress of economic uncertainty, it’s more important than ever to keep an open dialogue. Make sure you have the right math and language to explain results driven by direct and indirect marketing spend”.

With FLUZO, the dilemma of reporting is greatly simplified. You will have access to a single report for your entire campaign through a super agile, simple Power Bi dashboard, which will allow you to draw conclusions for upcoming financial periods and to state with complete transparency and clarity how everything has gone and how it could be improved.

3. Agile, real-time decisions: the third indispensable tool at a time of pressure on budgets and uncertainty about the economic environment is having real-time information. This is the way to avoid being locked into your initial media plan design and able to confidently alter course if the budgetary context changes.

As Ballis points out, in a world characterized by how fast everything goes, “companies and their partners (most importantly, their agencies) cannot all be working off of different metrics. Determine which metrics matter most and be sure everyone is operating off that set of data – internally and externally…”

With FLUZO you can consult your campaign's progress each week, medium by medium and globally on an easy-to-use dashboard. You can access an unprecedented level of granularity, and understand, for instance, how each medium performs throughout the day.