Making Intelligent Media Decisions with Marketing and Supply Synchronization

Against a backdrop of concerns over inflation and the potential for product shortages (and potentially excess product in some areas), customers are searching for bargains and demonstrating less loyalty than before. The most recent McKinsey & Co. US Consumer Pulse Survey revealed that more shoppers than ever are choosing different brands and retailers – 46 percent, up from 43 percent in 2021 and 33 percent in 2020.

In this highly-competitive environment, companies cannot continue to rely on traditional approaches to making media investment and inventory decisions. Companies are challenged to maximize the positive impact of their media investments, and that impact must be measurable in terms of inventory and revenue.

The Challenge of Aligning Demand with Supply

Without end-to-end visibility, it can be difficult or impossible to measure the impact of promotions at the granular levels that today’s market demands – down to product, channel, and specific geography. Companies have access to more data than ever before, but there are also more decisions than ever to be made, making it impossible to have enough people and time to make these optimization decisions at the right moment for impact.

As this Monitor Deloitte report on trade promotion optimization noted:

"Despite the advances in digitalization across all sales channels, trade promotions remain somewhat of a “black box” – most consumer goods companies are not entirely sure if they are truly effective. And despite the fact that we still lack transparency regarding their concrete impact on sales and profitability, trade promotions represent an important cost factor."

This lack of visibility is symptomatic of a larger challenge that businesses are facing across all functions and customer touchpoints: the complexity and speed of decisions exceeds the organization's capacity to make them.

Companies must overcome data and process silos within their organizations in order to make fully-informed Marketing decisions, including when and where to run media based on supply levels.

Decision Intelligence Offers a New Solution

Without the ability to optimize digital media spend on a granular level, based not only on historical media performance but on current inventory levels as well, companies can have difficulty adjusting to the pace of market change.

This is where Decision Intelligence offers a new opportunity. Companies can now leverage modern computing power, AI, and machine learning models to analyze, sense, and respond to changes more quickly than before. With Decision Intelligence, companies can optimize their investments and take action when circumstances change.

The amount of money being spent on digital marketing demands a higher level of visibility into its impact. And companies need to be able to shift their strategy and spend quickly enough to maximize ROI while also cultivating positive customer relationships. Decision Intelligence makes it possible to measure supply constraints versus channel, spend, and campaign duration, in real time, in order to achieve those results.

A Step-Change Improvement in Marketing

We collaborated with Gain Theory, a WPP company, to create a joint solution built on Aera Decision Cloud™ known as Marketing & Supply Synchronization. It connects supply and demand across organizational and data technology siloes so you can make fully-informed media planning and optimization decisions. Decision Intelligence leverages real-time data and AI for seamless, two-way communication between marketing and supply chain.

This visibility enables a step-change improvement in marketing and trade promotions that’s impossible to attain with legacy tools and processes. And this is only the beginning, as your company can implement Decision Intelligence within a matter of weeks and start to achieve greater visibility and decision-making agility across the entire business.

Watch a demo of Marketing & Supply Synchronization in our webinar presentation with Gain Theory and see how an AI platform for Decision Intelligence helps companies keep their brand promises to customers.