On Wednesday, April 17, the Chicago Connectory hosted Alexandra Gaski, a data scientist at McDonald’s. This event focused on how companies can use data to determine the success of their marketing and media efforts.

Gaski began the presentation by identifying issues all companies face when it comes to their marketing and media. Leadership will typically ask how marketing dollars are contributing to the overall business or how marketing directly influences sales. However, traditional marketing metrics, like in-store sales or media metrics, do not answer these questions.

Gaski explained that since there are so many external factors influencing sales and purchases, it is extremely difficult to attribute a sale to a specific marketing campaign. This is especially difficult for McDonald’s since the majority of their sales are in-store purchases compared to online sales.

However, by identifying all of these potential external factors (weather, competitor ads, region, size of store location, etc.) and using a complex regression model called Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM), McDonald’s is now able to determine the impact on sales and ROI measures for individual marketing activities. This model can be used not only to understand past performance but also to optimize future media spend across channels, products and messages.