Superbowl commercials are viewed globally and cost millions of dollars, yet when do companies know if such investments pay off? Answering such questions about the effectiveness of TV ads and other promotions used to take weeks of effort for a team of business intelligence (BI) experts at media agency MediaCom. Today, a business employee can independently determine the performance of a campaign in a few hours or days using the company’s new BI solution, which is based on Power BI for Microsoft Office 365.
Speeding insight into a campaign’s return is transformative for MediaCom, and so is its ability to create more useful BI, on demand, without any training. “The fact that Power BI is part of Office 365 is tremendous. All our people know Excel. With BI built on top of it, we don’t have to train them on anything new.” says Lowell Simpson, CIO of MediaCom. The solution allows a user to create a report that calculates a single score measuring a promotion’s effectiveness across channels such as TV, radio, print, billboards, social media, web search engines, and sponsorships. And the score updates automatically, giving real-time insight into a campaign’s return as it evolves.
People can also quickly change how reports look and are able to drill down into supporting data using many different tools in Excel. For example, they can visualize information on a global map to see trends in specific regions with Power Map. Or they can use the natural-query capabilities in Power BI Q&A to get fast answers to spur-of-the-moment questions. Users also are able to distribute reports, dashboards, and data sets using Power BI Sites, so other people can access the information virtually anytime, anywhere, and with any Internet-connected device.
With the new solution, MediaCom estimates that staff productivity will increase by at least 10 percent. As a result, it expects to save thousands of dollars on each project—and even millions of dollars on its largest campaigns. Clients will enjoy better service as well, and get the insight needed to help increase product interest, sales, and revenue.
You can learn more about MediaCom’s solution by watching the video below and reading the more detailed case study here.