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Laurie Sullivan @lauriesullivan, (January 20, 2018)

Constellation released findings from a programmatic advertising campaign in which marketers for the brand Black Box Wines fed in-store data into the platform to optimize the ads in near real-time, over a period of about 10 days.

The process helped marketers connect the dots between digital advertising and in-store sales as the campaign ran. “Understanding post-campaign is easy, but finding the connection takes specific technology,” says Karena Breslin, vice president of digital marketing at Constellation, the parent company of the brand Black Box Wines.

By collaborating with partners Amobee (formerly Turn), Oracle, and Labmatik, Black Box Wines piloted a new process to better understand the impact of marketing on the bottom line, rather than relying on traditional, top-of-the-funnel metrics.

Monthly conversion rates rose 49% from November to December 2016, with an average monthly increase of a 55% conversion rate from December 2016 to January 2017 using a 30-day attribution window. That 30-day window indicates that conversions were only counted if the user saw the ad within 30 days of showing up in the offline sales data.

The ads ran in video and display across desktop and mobile, but had most success with desktop ads. The company started the campaign with 68% of the budget in video, but after getting the initial results back in mid-December, marketers shifted more of the budget toward display on desktop, she explained.

“We ended the campaign with about 45% of the budget and 71% of the impressions with display on desktop,” she said. “That’s where we saw the strongest results.”

Offline transaction data from the Oracle Data Cloud was fed into the Amobee DMP and the ads were served online through the Amobee DSP. It enabled marketers to determine how a consumer interacted with an ad. Those two datasets in combination, said Breslin, allowed the company to improve optimization and conversion.

The company took the insights from last year’s campaign and continued to improve the process heading into 2017, to help marketers understand how digital advertising drove incremental sales in-store. The campaign, which ran from July through September 2017, resulted in a 20.4% lift in the number of sales and a 14% sales increase in the number of boxes purchased for those exposed to the ad.

Breslin believes the method used in the campaign can be applied across the company’s portfolio of brands, but says “what made the opportunity unique for Black Box was the ethos for the brand has always been innovation.”

MediaPost.com: Search Marketing Daily

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