Bayer drives incremental sales growth by optimizing for iROI

Bayer leveraged the power of Skai’s strategic partnership with Incremental, a leading provider of neutral retail media measurement, to directly integrate incrementality measurement into the omnichannel platform for media activation and most crucially, to demonstrate that going beyond return on ad spend (ROAS) and optimizing to incremental return on investment (iROI) can improve the efficiency of advertising investments in retail media.

Mature brands in a well-established category can find it difficult to drive truly incremental revenue growth, so the focus of the partnership was driving greater media efficiency from two well-established products: the painkiller Aleve® and One A Day® vitamins.

To accomplish this, they required a solution that could go beyond ROAS to separate incremental advertising sales from overlapping factors such as outside media investments, commerce factors like promotions, and external factors like seasonality and do so at a granularity and frequency required to be directly integrated into activation workflows to support in-flight campaign optimization.

The innovative solution brought together a team from Bayer, Skai, and Incremental to create the retail media industry’s first instance of fully connected incrementality measurement and activation.

The Incremental platform, through a combination of continuous-learning models and ongoing experimentation, isolated the incremental sales driven by each campaign across both search and offsite (DSP), giving Bayer and Skai complete visibility in their iROI each day.

By incorporating Bayer’s unique business objectives, commitments, and strategies into the optimization engine, the Incremental platform was able to use its understanding of iROI, diminishing returns, and this business context to generate optimal daily budget recommendations for every campaign. These budget recommendations kept the overall level of investment with the retail media network flat, but generated more sales by shifting investment from less to more incremental campaigns.

Through direct integration to Skai, created by the Skai Labs team, these incrementality signals and optimal campaign budgets seamlessly flowed into existing campaign management workflows within Skai. This direct integration enabled more than 1,000 daily budget optimizations to take place with ease.

Every day, Incremental’s model compared the predicted impact of these optimizations to what actually occurred to drive a continuous-learning feedback loop.

Improved Workflow Efficiencies: Direct integration of measurement into Skai enabled optimizations to take place at greater frequency and scale than would be possible by hand, and also saved significant time and effort across the Bayer and Skai teams.

Improved Media Efficiency: Through the integration of Incremental’s campaign-level measurement signals and optimizations into Skai’s omnichannel marketing platform, Bayer improved its iROI by over 32%—a dramatic growth beyond the goal of 10%. Overall, marketing efficiency ratio (MER) also improved significantly during this time period, as topline sales accelerated faster while investment in marketing remained flat—signaling an underlying gain in media efficiency.

Incremental helps brands and agencies drive incremental growth from their retail media investments through neutral and transparent measurement. Our approach is designed to be PII-free and compatible with the types of data available from the walled gardens, enabling it to be deployed seamlessly within a brand’s ecosystem of retail and media partners. Our methodology makes use of several well-established techniques to provide both a high degree of predictive accuracy and business utility. The resulting model generates insights granular enough to drive daily campaign optimization decisions while robust enough to be prescriptive in sales forecasting and media planning.

Bayer is a global enterprise with core competencies in the life science fields of health care and nutrition. In line with its mission, “Health for all, Hunger for none,” the company’s products and services are designed to help people and the planet thrive by supporting efforts to master the major challenges presented by a growing and aging global population. Bayer is committed to driving sustainable development and generating a positive impact with its businesses. At the same time, the Group aims to increase its earning power and create value through innovation and growth. The Bayer brand stands for trust, reliability and quality throughout the world. In fiscal 2023, the Group employed around 100,000 people and had sales of 47.6 billion euros. R&D expenses before special items amounted to 5.8 billion euros.