A large CPG struggled with ad spend allocation across brands, partners, and tactics due to a lack of precise, quantified knowledge of demand drivers. Interacting factors such as price, ad spend, seasonality, and word of mouth were impossible to disentangle, and they couldn’t efficiently build the most effective plan each month.
The media team was overly reliant on heuristics-based ad spend planning and needed a better way to understand the quantitative impacts of budget allocation decisions.
Quantified, Scenario-Based Planning: Using the Nucleus models for sales potential, the team was able to create various sales scenarios under different budgeting plans.
Nucleus allowed the CPG to not only forecast sales under marketing scenarios, but also to automatically create optimized promotion plans. These plans right-sized and allocated ad spend by tactic by week by geo–taking the varied sales drivers into account simultaneously. This drove huge gains in NPV of ad spend.