Thinkbox
The Media Mix Navigator is a free online tool which allows you to interrogate optimum media mixes, based on specific business parameters such as business category and risk level. To help you get the best out of the tool and discover new ways it can help we’ve gathered some use cases together.
Whether you’re a client looking for guidance on budget setting or a starting point for channel allocation, or an agency looking for some insight for a pitch or to help a new client, the Media Mix Navigator has the data to support you.
Take a look at how some others have used the tool for some inspiration, have a play with the tool or contact us to talk through your needs.
- Budget setting: Ecotone were looking to build the business case for the right level of advertising investment
- Benchmarking in your category:Vimto compared the level of ROI they achieved to a similar brand
- Sense check econometrics:The Office for Health Disparities (OHID) used filters in the Media Mix Navigator to create several scenarios to get an understanding of how different channel combinations impacted ROI
- To help with things that you have never done before:Wavemaker used the Media Mix Navigator to help guide channel investment and test plans for Vimto
For budget setting
Ecotone/Wavemaker
Ecotone were looking to build the business case for the right level of advertising investment across their brand portfolio. As most of the brands are relatively small or have had limited investment over the past few years, there was limited data on historic performance. Equally, some of the traditional benchmarking techniques (SOV/SOM analysis) to try and size optimal spends were not available due to a lack of good quality data particularly around market shares.
The Media Mix Navigator was used to understand the expected payback of different budget levels for each of the Ecotone brands by utilising the functions to change brand size and online sales percentages to adapt the scenarios more specifically to the brands in the portfolio. This helped Wavemaker understand the relationship between media spend, short-term sales performance and longer-term sales performance which in turn allowed them to understand the advertising/sales ratio for each of the brands. By running multiple budget scenarios, they could then determine the right level of investment in each brand.
The outputs from the Media Mix Navigator were used by the Marketing Director to pull a business case together for more marketing investment into the brands. The results also helped to demonstrate that the current marketing investment into the brands was not at the level required to deliver the growth targets.
“The Media Mix Navigator tool enabled our comms team to provide the Marketing Director with robust budget setting scenarios for long-term business growth when limited by other data sources. The depth of data that the tool is based on gives us confidence that the estimations we’ve made are sound and can be used within the Ecotone business.”
Sarah Bolton, Client Lead, Wavemaker
Benchmarking in your category
Vimto, Wavemaker
Vimto undertook econometric modelling for the first time in a number of years. One of the natural questions that occurred is how ‘typical’ the results that Vimto have seen are compared to other advertisers.
The Media Mix Navigator was used to compare the level of ROI achieved by Vimto to a similar brand at a comparable level of investment. This provided context to the results seen by Vimto’s econometric modelling to help understand whether to view the results as good, bad or indifferent.
The outputs from the Media Mix Navigator showed that Vimto’s results were comparable with other similar brands, which helped contextualise their strong performance and communicate back to the business to help build the case for further media investment in the coming years.
“Econometrics is really powerful in driving understanding of our marketing effectiveness and nicely complements other brand performance and monitoring tools. The additional context the Media Mix Navigator gave us on our results was invaluable to help us shape future investment in the Vimto brand”
Angela Reay, Brand Controller, Vimto
To sense check and benchmark your own econometric results/optimisations
The Office for Health Disparities (OHID), Wavemaker
The Office for Health Disparities (OHID) undertook their first econometric modelling projects in 2021 to understand the performance of their Better Health campaigns. Whilst this provided a view of ROI for the campaign, it wasn’t clear which areas of the campaign were working well because they were unable to distinguish between areas that generally worked well or whether they were a genuine strength of the OHID brand.
Wavemaker used filters in the Media Mix Navigator to create several scenarios to evaluate the efficacy of different channels on ROI overall for all brands skewed towards online actions. They selected and deselected different channels in the mix to get an understanding of how different channel combinations impacted ROI to see which combinations were generally strong and which were weaker.
The analysis helped divide the media channels used by OHID into four quadrants based on their strength of performance for OHID and within the Media Mix Navigator scenarios that were run. This highlighted several key insights:
- National press had been relatively weak for the OHID campaign, this theory was supported by the output of the Media Mix Navigator
- Strong performance in channels like radio, PPC and BVOD were encouraging for OHID but also in line with benchmarks
- There was an opportunity in TV and Paid Social which had both significantly over-performed the Media Mix Navigator benchmarks so were an area of genuine strength of the campaign for OHID
“Bringing wider context to our results is particularly important to understand where we focus efforts to drive better outcomes. The Media Mix Navigator allowed us to un-earth some real areas of strength within our campaign to inform future planning by providing invaluable context around our own results from our first round of econometrics”
Ella Sunyer, Head of Strategy & Planning, Behavioural Programs Unit at OHID
To help with things that you have never done before
Vimto, Wavemaker
Vimto undertook econometric modelling for the first time in a number of years aiming, amongst other things, to identify the opportunities for future growth.
The Media Mix Navigator was used to determine whether the optimised view of Vimto’s media mix, identified through their own econometrics, was in line with other brands of their type and, if not, where the opportunities lie.
The outputs from the Media Mix Navigator showed that whilst in general Vimto’s channel mix was comparable to an optimal scenario, Cinema was a real strength of Vimto’s performance which was not reflected in other brands whilst BVOD and Paid Social were opportunities as Vimto’s performance in these areas were less strong that the Media Mix Navigator indicated. This helped Wavemaker guide channel investment and test plans for 2022 and beyond.
“Whilst a client having their own econometrics is an invaluable source of insight it can be sometimes be difficult to get a feel for whether any result we see (good or bad) is unique or what we’d expect from similar brands. Being able to compare to the Media Mix Navigator’s outputs allowed us to contextualise Vimto’s results and identify opportunities for testing not apparent in the initial econometric results”
Dominic Charles, Head of Effectiveness, Wavemaker UK
