Food Marketing Summit 2011

The Food Marketing Summit features the ideal peer-to-peer networking environment for Top Level Executives in Marketing, Communications, Social Media and many other related fields within the food industry. Be a part of the Industry's Must Attend Event featuring thought leaders from the world's leading food manufacturers, discussing the key issues affecting the current and future growth of your business.

Join Damon Ragusa, ThinkVine CEO and Rafael Alcarez, Ph.D. Director Global Advanced Analytics, The Hershey Company as they present a session titled "Granularity in a Digital World-How Do You Activate the Right Consumers?"

As the media landscape changes at an increasing pace, marketers have found it more and more difficult to keep up with this change. Fragmentation lies at the heart of this phenomenon, with new platforms and technologies providing consumers more ways to consume and interact with media. However, the complexity does not stop there. As we continue to experience the "digital evolution," fragmentation is starting to happen down at the channel level.  Social media, blogs, display ads, search optimization, etc. are all sub-channels within the overall digital channel, and completely new ways of reaching the consumer are popping up at an alarming rate to disrupt the status quo.  How do you ensure you are activating the right consumers?

The approach lies with an agent-based purchasing model with consumers at the heart of the model. While the inputs and outputs are comparable to traditional models, the process to get from one to the other is drastically different. Within an agent-based model, consumers (tens of thousands of mathematically derived agents built to simulate heterogeneous consumers in reality) respond and interact with advertising and subsequently buy more or less of a certain product.  Within this model, we are solving for how consumers behave (and subsequently influence sales) rather than how marketing tactics behave (by manipulating betas in a regression model). What marketers end up with is a much more realistic representation of the path to purchase and a read on the effectiveness of their targeted digital tactics.

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