Apples to Apples, In-Store

Procter & Gamble is rewiring its in-store dashboard. P&G and a slate of other top marketers are expanding their test of a measurement system that compares in-store media to traditional advertising. The goal: to show the reach of in-store vehicles in terms that media planners can understand.

“Anytime you can have common dashboard looking at same metrics, you can compare the efficacy and reach of each medium,” says Dina Howell, P&G’s general manager of marketing global operations. “Allowing media planners to look across multiple, different media and make one recommendation to the client is very powerful.”

The system is called PRISM (Pioneering Research for an In-Store Metric). A Spring 2006 test in 10 stores proved that marketers can measure audience reach by aisle (not just store traffic) and can overlay that information with sales data to show a brand’s “closure rate”: the percentage of shoppers who bought the brand from among all shoppers who saw the brand’s message in-store.

PRISM will get a national test in first-quarter 2007 through the consortium — which includes P&G, 3M Co., Coca-Cola Co., Walt Disney Co., Kellogg Co. and Miller Brewing Co., as well as Albertsons, Kroger, Walgreens and Wal-Mart, and was organized by The In-Store Marketing Institute. The group is looking for additional partners to fund the national test, which could cost upwards of $15 million; the spring pilot cost about $1 million, funded by the manufacturers. (The retailers contributed data, not dollars.)

The group also needs to sign a research firm — to handle the data, and make the system commercially viable — before the next test can begin. Plans call for a four- to six-month test in geographically diverse stores; the service should launch shortly thereafter, positioned as a new industry standard that suits most retail formats and product categories, and factors in geographical, promotional and seasonal data.

Peter Hoyt, executive director of the In-Store Marketing Institute, says he expects to have a research syndicator (think ACNielsen or Information Resources, Inc.) signed by mid-November to help set the timeline for a commercial rollout.

The group is recruiting more brand partners, especially in product categories that aren’t yet covered; competitors of current members are also welcome. “There were a lot of places in stores where we didn’t have sensors to track traffic,” Howell says (see How It Works).

Retailers get traffic data by department, which helps them plan store layout and maximize strong category adjacencies. “I was worried at first that retailers would see this as way to get more money from manufacturers, but they really see it as a chance to understand adjacencies,” Hoyt says. Retailers could eventually establish “ad zones” comparable to TV programming blocks, he adds.

P&G doesn’t know how it’ll use the information it gets from the scaled-up test, but “we hope it’ll give us more precision on what shoppers are looking for, and what aisles they go down,” Howell says. “How many people get our message [in-store] and how many actually buy the product? If we know X number of shoppers go down the detergent aisle, and Y number of shoppers go down the skincare aisle, we can combine that with sales data from the retailers and see our closure rate.”

It was P&G’s interest that first sparked the study, Hoyt says. Last fall, he and Howell talked over dinner about the need for an industry standard. “P&G gets it that retail chains are amassing huge audiences and if someone could measure that audience, it could help them reallocate funds that they strongly suspect aren’t working in other media,” Hoyt says.

P&G has been using “a lot of very basic evaluation of short-term lift for promotions,” Howell adds. “It’s hard to see strategic benefits that way. This [measurement tool] lets you look more holistically at in-store media.”

Simply measuring impressions seems like a step back from tracking in-store promotions’ impact on sales, so some industry observers are skeptical. “This legitimizes in-store activity, but it’s activity-based, not results-based,” says EMAK CEO Jim Holbrook. “Are we worshipping the god of qualification, rather than results? At what point do you have enough qualification to make decisions?”

But the first goal of PRISM is “to get senior brand managers to appreciate in-store marketing is a vehicle to build brand equity,” Hoyt says. “It’s just how they think.”

“Most of our funding that’s not considered trade dollars — most of the equity-building marketing funds — are still going out to mass channels,” Howell says. “If you don’t find a way to compare [in-store] with mass channels, you can’t see the best place to make the investment.”

Once the system is established, it’s a short leap to connecting sales data, Hoyt adds: “Once we model a few stores in a chain, we can use sample scanner data, then overlay it to show sales lift. It’s natural that once we take this national, marketers will tie sales data to reach,” while other media (like TV) remain a step away from directly linking viewership to sales.

“There’s so much pressure for ROI and sales lift metrics, that’ll happen anyway,” Hoyt says. “We won’t have to push very hard.”

PRISM could complement Walgreen’s measurement system that uses RFID tags on P-O-P displays to track which displays, and which locations within the store, best influence sales (February 2006 PROMO). In fact, Goliath Solutions, the Deerfield, IL-based firm that runs Walgreens’ test, is a candidate to handle the expanded PRISM test.

“There has been tremendous interest in retail the last 10 to 15 years because shoppers are a captive audience,” Howell says. “How can you get their interest and make them notice you? That’s still what manufacturers are looking for. This metric can show them how many opportunities they have.”

HOW IT WORKS: Dicing the data

Based on early results, PRISM (Pioneering Research for an In-Store Metric) can forecast aisle traffic and unduplicated in-store media impressions by modeling data collected from a small sample of stores.

The May 2006 pilot test studied 64 product categories in 10 stores across grocery, mass and drug channels. (Each category was tracked for 14 days in one to five stores.)

Infrared sensors — like those used on automatic garage doors — were installed in aisles, around each store’s perimeter (what grocers call “the racetrack”) and at the entrance doors. The sensors recorded traffic (tracking the number of times the infrared beam was broken, and the direction the shopper was traveling) and the time of day and date. Observers spent 70 hours counting shoppers at the sensor locations to verify the sensor data. The traffic data was analyzed through a model to predict consumer reach by product category, by store format and by day of the week.

The resulting in-store traffic count was multiplied by in-store media compliance (including product visibility and display) to determine an “opportunity to see,” a specific measure of shoppers’ exposure to in-store media.

“The goal is to first count exposures, the absolute traffic in each category in the store,” says Peter Hoyt, founder of The In-Store Marketing Institute, which coordinated the pilot test. “You can return later to introduce ROI and lift, which other media can’t offer.”

Sales lift can be tracked by scanner data; marketers will have to set their own parameters to measure ROI. “It varies so much by product,” Hoyt says. “It’s so elastic, we couldn’t figure out how to pin that down.”

Media-planning shop Starcom MediaVest Group participated in the pilot by reviewing the data and suggesting applications.
— BS