Add Ready-to-use CPG Insights to Clean Rooms for Stronger ROI in 2024

The last few years have really transformed CPG advertising. The pandemic and inflation have changed consumer purchase behaviors, while an emerging generation of shoppers, Gen Z, has changed the game in brand loyalty. Meanwhile, government and consumer expectations about privacy, and the big moves made by Apple and announced by Google to deprecate third-party cookies, are causing brand marketers to rethink their data strategies.

As a result, more brands and agencies are expressing an interest in bringing data and analytics in-house. Clean rooms and other data-safe environments are a way for brands and agencies to create their own source of truth for consumer data. So it’s no surprise adoption is on the rise: 44% of marketers say they already have or are planning to have a clean room in the next 12 months^[1].

Marketers have plenty of good reasons. Half say they want a clean room for privacy reasons, while 56% say they’d like more in-depth analytics, and 54% want the ability to measure campaign results.

But 52% want to make data integration easier - and that may be a sticking point. It’s simply not a fast or easy process. In order to do it right, brands will need refined data as well as good data science.

The Clean Room Challenge

For many marketers, the place to start is with their own data. But on its own, first-party data isn’t enough for successful advertising campaigns. CPG brands generally lack a robust first-party data set due to the nature of their products purchased at the store. If CPG brands want to measure incremental sales or understand who their brand buyers are, they’ll need to bring in data from other sources.

However, this can be a long, arduous process if you’re starting from scratch. Assembling the right data sources - evaluating, vetting and cleansing them - is much more complicated and time-consuming than brands might expect. That means it may take longer to see a return on a clean room investment.

Of course, brand managers can get insights faster when they partner with data science experts who know how to combine data from disparate sources, leverage modern technology to fill gaps and apply modeling strategies to gain unique insights including ROI and ROAS. In fact, making it easier for brand marketers to use actionable purchase insights is a key reason NCSolutions (NCS) launched its CPG Insights Stream solution. This turnkey service allows CPG brands to easily add household purchase insights to their clean room so they can develop more effective campaigns and gain a faster return on their clean room investment.

Faster Clean Room ROI with CPG Purchase Insights

Ready-to-use insights, like NCS’ CPG Insights Stream, can help brand marketers get enormous value out of their cleanroom investments. Some efforts take time, but for marketers under pressure to show fast ROI, here are three ways to put your clean room to work immediately.

• Measure campaigns for a total sales view

Match household purchase data to campaign ad exposures to understand the total amount of sales by your exposed audiences. Brands will need an ID spine to make the match, but with turnkey CPG purchase data, this use case can be activated fairly quickly.

• Enrich your CRM

Most CRMs only provide a partial view of buyers. Yet, to understand who your most loyal customers are, you need the full picture. By enriching your CRM with ready-to-use purchase insights, you’ll learn which customers are buying from your competitors and if they’re purchasing other brands as part of your corporate family. For CPG brands, this approach is a privacy-safe way to complete the data picture. And once you’re able to see the full picture, you can engage households with loyal buyers or target households with similar purchasing behaviors to expand your reach and grow market share.

• Optimize your customer lists

Create a better experience for customers and make your ad campaigns more efficient. You can use purchase insights to suppress households that recently bought your products. You’ll achieve two goals: eliminate unnecessary ads and save your budget.

These may be standard use cases, but without usable data, brands will struggle to get campaigns off the ground. With turnkey purchase insights and smart data science, CPG brands will get fast ROI from their clean room and meet or exceed 2024 marketing objectives.