CANNES: Diageo, the alcoholic drinks manufacturer, has seen impressive results having built a marketing effectiveness tool that offers granular insights into the impact of its communications.

Andrew Geoghegan, Diageo’s global consumer planning director, discussed this subject during a session at the 2018 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

“Our objective was to build a genuinely sustainable marketing-effectiveness capability. We wanted to use data and analytics to ensure our money was being spent in the best way possible,” he said. (For more, read WARC’s in-depth report: How Diageo’s new analytics tool drives marketing effectiveness.)

And the result was “Marketing Catalyst”, a solution that fuses seemingly disparate datapoints to help Diageo’s marketers across the globe make decisions at speed.

“The scope of our investment is vast – from deciding what the total budget for Diageo is to deciding how much to invest in India, versus China, versus Brazil, right down to how much we need to spend on Tusker beer in Kenya, week by week, on digital, social and TV,” said Geoghegan.

“Imagine the shift: Over 1,300 Diageo marketers in 50 countries consistently basing all their marketing-investment choices on an objective assessment of the consumer sales it was likely to drive in the long and short term.”

Elaborating on the strengths of “Marketing Catalyst”, Geoghegan stated that it “brings together internal and external performance data with low cost analytics” and provides “an easy-to-use tool which we've designed around our business process.”

Moreover, he explained to the Cannes assembly, it also boasts a “capability and coaching program which is integrated with our core ‘Diageo way’ of brand building.”

The main aims for Marketing Catalyst are to establish where funds can be transferred between brands in reflection of their growth potential, as well as tailoring the media mix to deliver the optimal return on investment (ROI) from the firm’s outlay.

“We have a totally new toolkit focused on the big business questions our planners need to answer. It helps us understand culture, consumer motivation, and behavior,” said Geoghegan.

“It helps us develop and optimize creative work, and make better choices about how to use it to drive more growth.”

Sourced from WARC