How KSM used Attain’s Signal to make in-store sales the north star with a leading CPG client

KSM is an independent media agency and Agency of Record (AOR) for a leading U.S. meat manufacturer sold in retailers nationwide. The meat brand competes in a crowded category against legacy competitors with significant media scale. The brand's growth thus depended on precision and agility: understanding which placements, channels, and tactics were producing incremental sales, and being able to move budget while the campaign was still live. Its inherited reporting model described media metrics, but not whether the brand was gaining actual buyers. Partnering with Attain enabled KSM to connect the brand's full media investment to verified, in-store sales as the primary source of truth.

Challenge

KSM inherited a reporting model built on media metrics: CPM efficiency, reach and frequency, impressions. Those metrics described the effectiveness of media delivery, but they did not describe whether the brand was gaining buyers, and they gave the client no basis for moving budget between channels mid-flight. The alternative was marketing mix modeling (MMM), which returns results six months after the decisions that mattered. 

In the past, Social was the hardest part of the plan to hold accountable to in-store sales outcomes. Programmatic sales measurement has been available for years, but measuring social against in-store grocery purchases for a major CPG brand had not been, leaving a significant share of working media evaluated on engagement alone.

Solution

As an independent agency, KSM tailors each of their solutions from the ground up for each client. For this CPG meat brand, KSM brought in Attain Signal to close the in-store sales measurement gap in social, enabling them to connect the channel to the rest of the media plan. Signal sends Attain's verified purchase events directly to each social platform's Conversions API (CAPI), so the brand could see offline grocery sales for each social partner in the same currency it used for programmatic. With social and programmatic measured against the same sales metric, the brand and agency had a common basis for evaluating revenue performance across the whole plan. Because sales results were visible inside each social and programmatic platform while the campaign was live, KSM's team could shift budget toward the channels driving the most sales and then go a level deeper into the geographies and creative that performed best, which improved sales performance over the course of the flight.

The team started with a small test that measured a slice of the plan, and the results were strong enough that Attain and KSM presented the methodology to the client together. Within three months, KSM was measuring the brand's full media investment against verified sales.

Outcomes

Growth for this brand meant expanding the buyer base, so the KSM team optimized for household penetration. Attain made their goal a measurable outcome the brand could optimize to, in-real time, per campaign -  rather than a metric in a post-campaign report. 

Three findings surfaced that the old reporting could not have produced. Signal data showed one social platform driving sales at rates above every other channel in the plan, so KSM shifted budget toward it mid-flight. User-generated creative outperformed against purchase behavior, validating creative decisioning. And geographies with little historical media support turned out to be producing sales, opening an entirely new dialogue about media distribution. Ultimately, the brand was able to pull optimization levers and improve sales performance that hadn’t been visible before.