In-store purchase data is one of the last missing pieces of the digital puzzle for consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands. Nishat Mehta, president of IRI's Media Center of Excellence—the market research company’s team that develops new targeting and measurement products for CPG, retail and media companies—spoke with eMarketer's Yory Wurmser about the rise of targeting based on in-store purchases and what's currently attainable for CPG marketers. Mehta was interviewed as part of eMarketer’s May report, "O2O Measurement and Marketing 2018: How Location Tracking, Identity Graphs and In-Store Metrics Are Improving Online-to-Offline Capabilities."
eMarketer:
Have you seen an increased interest in O2O [online-to-offline] solutions over the past year or so?
Nishat Mehta:
We have. The biggest challenge we face is educating the market that purchase-based solutions actually exist. For a hundred years, CPGs have been used to doing advertising on proxies and not on actual offline behavior.
We're seeing huge interest because the performance is significantly better. Purchase-based targeting is maybe twice as expensive, but has roughly four to five times the ROAS [return on ad spend] of targeting based on context or demographics.
eMarketer:
What's an example of a purchase-based targeting product?
