How Mars uses media experiments to measure sales lift with Cortex

Consumer packaged goods brands invest significantly in advertising, driving brand affinity to boost sales now and in the future. Campaigns are often optimized as they run by monitoring media-in-progress metrics against strategies like targeting specific audiences cohorts. However, because most sales happen in physical stores, accurately linking media sales lift to target audiences while ads are running can be a challenge. 

Many solutions use “total ad sales” for measurement, but this metric doesn’t always correlate to incremental sales, which is Mars Wrigley’s gold standard key performance indicator (KPI) for media effectiveness. 

So how do you know if your current ad spend is paying off while it’s still possible to optimize your in-flight campaigns?

Mars Wrigley is working with EPAM, and using Google Cloud Cortex Framework, to make significant progress tackling this issue with an approach that introduces an agile way to accurately measure in-flight audience effectiveness based on incremental sales.