Business Benefits and Cost Savings Enabled by Adverity’s Data and Analytics Platform.
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We commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact (TEI) study and examine the potential return on investment (ROI) companies may realize by deploying our end-to-end data and analytics platform. The study was published in February 2022.
As consumers blur the lines between different channels, the challenge of linking marketing spending to business results intensifies. Marketers need to be accountable for their spending, but this is easier said than done - harmonizing data from multiple channels that were never designed to work together is complex and time-consuming. Marketers need solutions that provide “right-time”, unified insights across omnichannel marketing initiatives to guide their next moves and investments.
Adverity provides a data and analytics platform to help organizations improve and speed up the way they make insights-driven marketing decisions.
Adverity commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study and examine the potential return on investment (ROI) enterprises may realize by deploying the Adverity end-to-end data and analytics platform. The purpose of this study is to provide readers with a framework to evaluate the potential financial impact of Adverity’s platform on their organizations.
To better understand the benefits, costs, and risks associated with this investment, Forrester interviewed the decision-maker of an organization that has experience using the Adverity platform. Forrester used this experience to project a three-year financial analysis.
Prior to using Adverity’s data and analytics platform, the interviewee noted that their organization was “doing marketing in the dark.” Although the global marketing performance team did run analytics and reporting on its marketing activities, this was usually siloed by channel, giving the organization a limited oversight of its overall performance. Furthermore, a lot of the analytics work was fragmented. As a result, the organization was often not able to make marketing decisions backed by data and insights in a timely manner.
The Adverity platform’s data connectivity and dashboard reporting helped speed up the time-to-insight for the organization, and provided a near real-time, omnichannel view of its marketing performance. The decision-maker and their organization now had data and insights at their fingertips and could use it to make timely decisions on ongoing marketing activities.
Risk-adjusted present value (PV) quantified benefits include:
The customer organization also experienced some additional benefits which were not quantified in the financial model:
Risk-adjusted PV costs include:
Overall, the interview and financial analysis found that the decision-maker’s organization experienced benefits of $5.29 million over three years versus costs of $1.13 million, adding up to a net present value (NPV) of $4.16 million and an ROI of 368%.
Evidence and data. The interviewed decision-maker highlighted that the Adverity platform’s information allowed for significant savings with near real-time spend optimization for all digital marketing campaigns. They reported that one of the organization’s biggest challenges was not being able to adjust its campaigns in near real time, and that it lacked full insights on each dollar spent on its marketing and advertising efforts. Adverity’s platform provided new insights on the effectiveness of its marketing programs.
In the past, individual campaign activities were monitored on weekly or monthly basis, so teams could not make timely decisions to optimize the campaigns as they only had insufficient and isolated insights. With Adverity, the team is now able to assess results across all channels within a couple of days and adapt as it sees fit. For instance, it could now pause or boost advertising spend or reallocate its money across different channels as needed, instead of waiting weeks to review their performance. If the team had to wait, the campaign would have incurred more in additional ad spend.
Modeling and assumptions. For the financial model, Forrester assumes:
Risks. Factors that could impact the realization of this benefit include:
Results. To account for these risk factors, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 15%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total present value (discounted at 15%) of almost $2,934,00.
Evidence and data. One of the key benefits the interviewed decision-maker highlighted was the time savings the global marketing insights team experienced with data analytics operations. Previously, the team of six data analysts had to manually clean, merge, and map data from multiple sources before it could be analyzed. The team then had to spend additional time preparing charts and reports, disseminating these reports across the organization, etc. This process was repeated weekly or monthly, time-consuming, and simply not sustainable.
The interviewed decision-maker reported that with Adverity many of the reports and dashboards could be run and updated automatically. This freed up about 80% of the data analysts’ time that they previously spent on these manual tasks.
Modeling and assumptions. For this financial model, Forrester assumes that, of the total time savings, 75% of it is captured and put back into more value-add work like analyzing data.
Risks. Several factors that could impact the realization of this benefit include:
Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 10%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total present value of over $564,000.
Evidence and data. The local marketing teams spread throughout the more than 70 markets the organization is in also benefitted from the Adverity deployment. Adverity helped to streamline their marketing analytics activities. For instance, where they previously had to spend time consolidating and merging data from different marketing channels to analyze their campaign performance, they could now easily access this data on Adverity. The interviewee estimates that local marketing managers and analysts could reduce the time they were spending on marketing analytics activities by 75%.
Modeling and assumptions. For this financial model, Forrester makes the following assumptions:
Risks. Several factors that could impact the realization of this benefit include:
Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 10%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total present value of over $1,793,000.
The customer also experienced some additional benefits which have not been quantified and included in the financial model:
Transformation into a data-driven organization. The interviewed decision-maker highlighted that Adverity triggered an acceleration towards the organization becoming more data-driven.
Evidence and data. The primary costs associated with Adverity are the subscription fees. The subscription fees presented in this financial model were provided by the interviewed decision-maker and will vary by organization and use case. The interviewed decision-maker also engaged Adverity to help with integrating their data sources onto the platform, incurring some professional service costs at the start of the project.
Risks. These fees are largely dependent on the scale of deployment and vary based on the number of data sources connected to the platform and the volume of data to be analyzed.
Results. To account for these variances, Forrester adjusted this cost upward by 10%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total present value (discounted at 10%) of over $998,000.
Evidence and data. The second category of costs the decision-maker’s organization incurred with the Adverity investment is project management costs.
To help with implementation, the organization engaged an external project manager for six months, incurring $114,000 at the start of the project.
Once fully deployed, there is minimal effort to manage the administrative aspects of Adverity on an ongoing basis.
Results.To account for variances in complexity of deployment, Forrester adjusted this cost upward by 10%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total present value of almost $133,000.
The financial results calculated in the Benefits and Costs sections can be used to determine the ROI, NPV, and payback period for the organization’s investment. Forrester assumes a yearly discount rate of 10% for this analysis.
These risk-adjusted ROI, NPV, and payback period values are determined by applying risk-adjustment factors to the unadjusted results in each Benefit and Cost section.
