On Wednesday, April 17,
the Chicago Connectory hosted Alexandra Gaski, a
data scientist at McDonald’s. This event focused on how companies can use data to determine the
success of their marketing and media efforts.
Gaski
began the presentation by identifying issues all companies face when it comes
to their marketing and media. Leadership will typically ask how marketing
dollars are contributing to the overall business or how marketing directly
influences sales. However, traditional marketing metrics, like in-store sales
or media metrics, do not answer these questions.
Gaski
explained that since there are so many external factors influencing sales and
purchases, it is extremely difficult to attribute a sale to a specific
marketing campaign. This is especially difficult for McDonald’s since the
majority of their sales are in-store purchases compared to online sales.
However,
by identifying all of these potential external factors (weather, competitor
ads, region, size of store location, etc.) and using a complex regression model
called Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM), McDonald’s is now able to determine the
impact on sales and ROI measures for individual marketing activities. This
model can be used not only to understand past performance but also to optimize future
media spend across channels, products and messages.