GROWTH ACCELERATOR (GA) is the latest iteration of UM’s proprietary global OESP channel planning and optimization platform that has been best in class for over 11 years, with continual evolution to maintain its market leading position. Uniquely built from the ground up, it includes a number of powerful AI and machine learning algorithms that enable planners to build and optimise our clients’ media plans to deliver the best business outcomes from all investment.
Over a number of years, we have increasingly ingested 2nd and 3rd party data sets to further improve the accuracy of GA. IPA data is used to inform objective setting, while reach curves created from 1st party data from the largest media owners sit within the tool, fused with our own industry leading audience data.
High Value Audiences (HVA) created using our powerful people-based data stack, can be ingested into GA. We can the build our plans within the tool using these bespoke audiences, and subsequently can push them directly through to various buying platforms. We have closed the loop and moved beyond proxy audiences, delivering optimised campaigns against custom audiences, specific to each client.
At the start of the process, within the tool, a planner completes a questionnaire to help define the correct communication objectives to achieve our client’s marketing or business objectives. This is powered by our proprietary panel data which is refreshed regularly.
Once the Objective Profile has been set, proprietary methodology ranks channels and their performance throughout the customer journey. Planners can then analyse and select appropriate channels to take through to budget allocation.
There are several optimisers that sit within the tool that planners can use to apportion budget. The Mix Optimiser uses costs and cross media unduplicated reach curves, to optimise against an objective. The Genetic Optimiser at the heart of the GA will create multiple combinations of plans, taking the best aspects of each scenarios, producing new versions thousands of times. The optimiser is so powerful we have to connect the tool to a cloud based infrastructure.
The What If tool takes this one step further and will generate the optimal plan at multiple budget levels, showing the best result at each stage, to inform client budget setting.
You can use the tool to calculate deduped reach for your media plans.
We achieve this through the Connections Survey which provides a ‘single-source’ for accurately accounting for duplication. Some agencies rely on random duplication or the Sainsbury formula that essentially assumes channels are equally independent of each other, thus overstating incremental reach.
There are many more features within the platform that have been added over the last decade and the above only scratches the surface.
Access to the MIE platform here (Select GA)
Latest training overview (March 2022) can be found here.
Training videos for each section of the tool are available here.
There are also helpful training videos as you navigate the tool.
Make sure you have access to the Growth Accelerator Teams and SharePoint site.
