Analytics is no game for an interactive gaming publisher

Driving marketing return on investment

An interactive publisher was having difficulty measuring its return on marketing investment with retailers. The company wanted to know which promotional tactics were most effective across the retailers selling its games to consumers who play the games on mobile devices, video game consoles, social networks, and in virtual worlds.

Several challenges made it difficult to calculate marketing ROI, including inefficient processes that created confusion between retail and product development teams–neither of which had clear oversight of the promotional tactics used. In addition, poor data quality and a lack of data granularity blurred the real story of campaign effectiveness. Adding to the confusion, a flawed data model was unable to adequately capture or illustrate the company’s financial relationship with retailers.

Deloitte helped the company transform its data model and capture mechanism to improve tracking and analysis of promotional activities and estimate the ROI for various promotional tactics. By gathering sales and promotional spend data across the product lifecycle and developing a series of econometric data models to isolate promotions spend from other factors, Deloitte helped the company unlock insights on the overall campaign effectiveness.

As a result of this concept, the company can now map its marketing spend to promotion vehicles and types and identify which campaigns are most effective. For example, the company learned that its discount-based promotions are 12 percent more effective than buy one, get one (BOGO) or giveaway offers—and that larger discounts can be used to drive sales without compromising revenue and profit. A positive cross-retailer effect of marketing spend was uncovered across all products and retailers, which ultimately increased sales across individual retailers, and more importantly multiple retailers.

To track this company’s journey from vision to value, download the visual case study.​