Helping FMCG advertisers measure the offline business impact of their campaigns

There are more than 700 million internet users* in India today. Indian businesses that sell online have been valued as ‘Unicorns’ - however in segments like FMCG, more than 90% of consumption happens offline, right from Kirana stores to large modern trade formats.  

And this is not a shrinking market – FMCG sales are projected to double from 2020 to 2025.** When evaluating the success of a campaign, you may depend on brand lift surveys to understand mind measure, but you also need to know how the campaign drove sales and market share in stores. In addition, where did those sales come from? Did it come at the cost of a competitor or did the overall market grow? How does this view change from Mumbai to Bangalore to Kolkata? 

However, when my colleagues and I speak to our advertising partners (both at the agency and client), we observe that most of the media conversations are actually focused on input-based mechanisms – such as age and demographic-based validation or completion rates.  

Our next move was to build a network of partner stores to understand real-time sales of brands via billing systems with our partner Aintu. Before we identified the right mechanism for these insights, we explored other options to understand the impact:  

• POS payment mechanisms do not provide granular SKU-level details – you do not know what exactly is being purchased 
• Panel based reporting typically involves an 8-to-12-week lag and historically does not operate below the state level. Typically used to estimate market share.  
• Some large FMCG brands partner with their direct store network through their own salesforce. However, there can be salesforce biases there and they do not get access to basket level purchases. 

So, here is our approach: Integrating via Billing systems  

• Store formats: General and Modern Trade Stores including independently owned self-service grocery stores equipped with a billing system, one or more checkout counters, and an internet connection.  
• Scale: Covers multiple thousands of stores across nine cities, evaluating more than 45,000 SKUs and 100,000+ shopping baskets a day. Total GMV*** being analyzed is more than INR 3500 Crores a year.  
• Frequency: At least weekly updates (and soon daily updates). 
• Analytical Depth: At the country, state, city and (soon) pincode level. Allowing FMCG advertisers to understand impact at multiple levels, for example, different creatives or languages for different cities.  

As an example of the power of this data, we examined one of our campaigns for a soft drinks brand, let us call them Brand X. Our observations: 

• The category had been growing with the onset of summer, clearly showing seasonality. However, Brand X grew by 100% by the end of the campaign while the category grew by only 78%.  
• By the end of the campaign, Brand X also saw a net gain in market share (from 10.89% to 12.64%) within our panel of stores. 

We called this solution JioAds Retail Analytics and Measurement Platform (JioAds R-AMP) and we hope to partner with you to understand how consumers shop. Reaching the right audience is now more accessible than ever and presents a world of opportunities for advertisers.  

If you would like to know more, write to us at JioAds.Advertiser@ril.com 

Gulshan Verma 

CEO, JioAds 

* Source: Nielsen's India Internet Report 2023 

** IBEF FMCG report, 2022 

*** Gross Merchandise Value