ASICS
Client
Industry
Retail and consumer goods
Use Cases
Campaign Optimisation
Clean Room
Innovation
Measurement
Media Optimisation
A global sports and apparel brand selling into markets around the world, ASICS needed a flexible, tailored incrementality solution that would enable the company to optimise its advertising impact across geographies.
With the LiveRamp Clean Room, powered by Habu, ASICS now has a much greater ability to identify incremental revenue streams by leveraging innovative experimentation techniques and industry-leading clean room solution.
Intro
As a performance sports brand, ASICS depends upon effective media spend in Google and Facebook to drive sales. In order to optimise these investments and power growth, ASICS constantly works to refine its model for customer attribution – which is no easy task given the diversity of online and offline media a typical customer may be exposed to prior to a conversion.
Having found that traditional multi-touch attribution (MTA) and marketing mix modelling (MMM) analysis could not provide the attribution certainty they needed to adjust their media spend with confidence, ASICS sought to pursue a study of incrementality via experimentation and measurement.
The Challenge
With sales occurring across numerous online and offline channels, ASICS faced a challenge in accurately attributing conversions to ad impressions. Since many customers are on Google and Facebook daily, conversions can easily fall within the attribution window of both platforms. Incrementality – the study of the real incremental value of ad spend within and across channels – would fine-tune ASICS’ attribution capabilities and enable them to adjust budgeting accordingly.
Determining incrementality is an involved process, run on an ad platform, that requires carefully constructed experiments that measure advertising effectiveness via test and control groups. Since incrementality experimentation comes at the cost of suppressing ads, doing it well requires a nuanced and deliberate learning agenda that efficiently produces targeted answers while working around the sales calendar.
ASICS considered pursuing a geo-based matched market analysis on its own, but quickly determined that an expert outside vendor would be preferable. ASICS chose the LiveRamp Clean Room, powered by Habu, for its unique combination of advanced experimentation solution and broadly interoperable data clean room.
The Solution
The partnership began with the ASICS marketing team in Europe and the engagement quickly expanded to ASICS teams in the US, Australia, and Japan. A schedule of targeted incrementality tests for each geography was developed in collaboration with the regional teams. Each geo plans on several tests per year, with the accruing data and analysis guiding future investment decisions.
While incrementality experimentation is necessarily hands-on for companies, the automation and efficiency of the LiveRamp Clean Room, powered by Habu has made the process far simpler for ASICS. The first step is to define the objectives of a test, then the LiveRamp Clean Room, powered by Habu produces the test’s ad suppression set by joining data with a containerised code file in the data clean room. Once the test is run, the LiveRamp Clean Room, powered by Habu processes the output data and delivers an adjusted return on ad spend report that provides recommended investment changes per channel in order to optimise spend and increase sales.
A unique multi-geography experimentation capability and flexible, interoperable clean room technology enable the LiveRamp Clean Room, powered by Habu to deliver high-level insights and recommendations for ASICS globally. The ASICS team is able to put forward granular questions for testing within a walled garden without having to deal directly with that highly technical environment or generating the associated SQL code.
The LiveRamp Clean Room, powered by Habu, has allowed us to identify the incremental impact of both our separate revenue driving channels and for different tactics within each channel, allowing us to refine and sharpen our performance marketing strategy based on data driven insights.
The Results
The LiveRamp Clean Room, powered by Habu delivers powerful experimentation methodology that enables ASICS to develop their learning agenda holistically and progressively, while answering a number of key questions related to incrementality. Beginning with measurement across entire channels, ASICS can now explore interactions by type of campaign both across retail channels and partners and within discrete channels to understand which campaigns are working and which are not.
The ability to effortlessly integrate data from multiple sources has allowed us to unlock insights and identify trends that were previously hidden in silos. As a result, we have enhanced our measurement capabilities, enabling us to make informed decisions that drive business growth.
What’s Next?
Looking ahead, ASICS wants to leverage LiveRamp’s industry-leading clean room technology to incorporate wholesale sales data from retail partners into their incrementality analysis. LiveRamp’s combination of advanced experimentation capability and best-in-class data clean room mean that customers like ASICS can access and utilise hard to reach data from all types of sales channels in pursuit of incrementality insights. It’s a technology combination that no other vendor can bring to the table.