How Heist used insights to measure the unmeasurable

For decades, brand and performance marketing have been uneasy bedfellows. But as most companies embrace the necessity to engage with both disciplines well, there is untapped potential in applying the principles of performance marketing to brand building. 

Here at Attest, we’ve (literally) written the book on how to bridge the divide between performance and brand marketing. In it, we unveil our handy framework, distilled into four stages, to building a true performance brand. We like to call it the ‘growth cycle’ – comprising the distinct areas of ‘learn’, ‘validate’, ‘reach’, and ‘measure’. 

The ‘measure’ stage of the growth cycle 

The ‘measure’ stage of the growth cycle is all about – you guessed it – measurement. Once you’ve learned about your audience during the learn stage, tested your hypotheses during the validate stage, and used all of those learnings to power your acquisition strategies during the reach stage, all that’s left is to measure the effects of your efforts and start the cycle again. 

During the Measure stage, you might carry out pre- and post-campaign tests to see how an ad campaign influenced certain brand health metrics (such as brand awareness). You might also take things more long-term and monitor your brand’s health over a certain amount of time (also known as brand tracking). 

So, how do brands use the measure stage of the growth cycle in the real world? We asked marketing leaders across a range of industries and compiled their experience into our book – and we’ve pulled one case study for this blog post.

Want to get your hands on the complete book? Download it for free below…

How Heist used insights to measure the unmeasurable 

OOH advertising is often considered a very difficult, if not impossible, medium for advertisers to track. How do you measure the success of billboards, Tube ads, and the like? How do you justify the cost of a pricey OOH campaign as an SMB with a limited marketing budget?

For Heist, the underwear brand who made it their mission to “liberate women from disappointing underwear”, the team weren’t satisfied with crossing their fingers and hoping for the best. For them, it was crucial to understand if their OOH ads were reaching and resonating with the women for whom the brand was built.

Heist began running punchy OOH ad campaigns, and used a process of elimination to determine the ads’ success. They honed in on the metrics that would make the so-called “untrackable” results of OOH advertising easy for them to measure. For them, this involved focusing on an uplift in website traffic that came from non-paid, non-triggered sources – i.e. people who didn’t come through digital advertising, or some sort of tracked campaign that they had live.

The team reported on the uplift in this traffic (which they call ‘OBD traffic’) before, during, and after each OOH campaign was live, using the ‘pre-period’ of three weeks before an OOH ad went up as the baseline, then recording the uplift during the ‘live period’, and measuring the ‘post-period’ of three weeks to see if the baseline went up.

The result? The live periods for each campaign always saw more OBD traffic, and in almost every case, the post-period baseline was higher after the ad had finished running. That means that the OOH ads were doing exactly as they were meant to – increasing brand awareness and activation, even after the posters came down.

Heist aren’t the only brand who’ve used speedy insights to drive business growth. You’ll find even more examples of data-driven brand building in our book, the performance brand – get a free copy below…