Create data-powered performance across restaurant brands

As part of its strategy to create long-term value for its brands, a global multi-brand restaurant company partnered with Ekimetrics to build its in-house media optimization solution, resulting in an agile and transparent capability for optimizing media allocation.

Challenge

Our client is building a global restaurant company unlike any other: its portfolio currently includes more than 30,000 restaurants worldwide with continued growth.

Creating shared capabilities to add value at scale

Its overarching vision is to invigorate great brands and supercharge their long-term growth. This investment thesis is notably embodied by its commercial services center where it invests at scale in a number of areas, including: data & analytics, loyalty program design, and media strategy, planning and buying.

“We’re building a platform company. When we put restaurant brands onto the platform, we invest in shared services that make those brands more valuable than before,” says their Data Project Director. “Our job is to support our brands. And one of the biggest levers we have is our media spend. We are a top media buyer in the United States and we want to ensure our media spend is creating the most impact.”

An independent partner to improve the impact of media spend

In the space of only 4 years, the company has brought together 5 major brands. However, each of them had taken different approaches to media measurement and to steering spend. Some of them used the analytics arms of their media buying agencies, others had engaged outside consultants.

Our client wanted to create best practices for Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) across the group and provide an independent perspective on the effectiveness of spend deployment. Specifically, it wanted to avoid agency conflicts of interest, especially with regard to the massive media budgets deployed– each brand has multiple $100’s of millions to allocate and optimize annually. Ultimately, it was about providing the individual brands, and their CMOs, with better-performing solutions.

To accomplish these goals, Ekimetrics was selected as an independent partner.

Our approach

Transparent Modeling Approach, Tools, and Processes

Our client placed a priority on fully understanding the models and methodologies involved in MMM, the ability to adapt the program structure over time to changing business priorities, and the scalability of the program to cover all brands in the portfolio and provide a unified language of value.

Through the build-out of the MVP MMM program, standardized modeling tools, processes, and comprehensive documentation were all delivered to the client, customized as needed to their priorities and requirements. These delivered components provide complete visibility into measurement methodology and have enabled full transfer of MMM program ownership and maintenance to client data science and engineering teams.

More frequent measurement to improve time to market

Another motivating factor was to increase the frequency of measurements.

“Many of the media mix models available to the brands were only refreshed once a year” says the Data Project Director. “We needed actionable insights on a frequent and ongoing basis.”

By bringing the capability in-house, and partnering with Ekimetrics, the global multi-brand restaurant company is now able to refresh models at will and can use the insights more effectively to inform its planning and budget allocation processes.

For the first time, we are able to consistently compare the performance of the media spend across our brands.

Outcome

On the technical side, because all the brands historically had different agencies, their data was in different formats. Ekimetrics defined a workable taxonomy with the appropriate level of complexity to analyze spend by category and run simulations by channel. This made it possible to integrate past data into prediction models and has cleared the path for Inspire Brands to pursue its analytics roadmap even faster.

“In many cases, the demand for extending the scope of what Ekimetrics delivers is coming from our data science teams themselves. Ekimetrics has really become part of the team and has come to play a critical role” says the Data Project Director. “Ekimetrics was able to share their knowledge and expertise on how they’ve done that type of measurement.”

At each step, our client took full ownership of the frameworks and models before working together with Ekimetrics to translate its roadmap into durable solutions.

“Ultimately, our individual brand CMOs who are the judges of what we do. They rely on us to create models and methodologies that give them an edge.”

“For the first time, we are able to consistently compare the performance of the media spend across our brands” says the Data Project Director. “This is giving us more opportunities to elevate the performance of brands by sharing learnings.”