Illumis™, by Valassis, a Vericast business, is a transformative marketing platform that combines best-in-class technologies, innovative media and robust intelligence to empower marketers to directly tie insight-led strategies to high-performing consumer content.
Consumers are constantly adapting to today’s realities, embracing new interests, and consuming different media. This shifting behavior, coupled with a landscape that is rapidly evolving, is a challenge for marketers seeking to build integrated strategies responsive to today’s consumer.
Illumis was purposefully built to plan, execute, and optimize marketing in a seamless way to expand reach and improve results. This unified marketing platform helps marketers keep pace with the changes in consumer behavior; unifies the disparate tools marketers must manage and balance when creating campaigns; and removes silos around data and execution.
The platform offers a competitive, data-informed approach to omnichannel media buying, fueled by the powerful, predictive intelligence of the two-time award-winning Valassis Consumer Graph™. The Consumer Graph unifies massive amounts of data by making 7 trillion daily model calculations to help customers improve marketing strategy, audience targeting, engagement and results.
How Illumis brings data together to uncover consumer motivation is unique. Using patented analyses and rich text mining on over 110 billion bid stream signals every day, they can discover consumer interest as well as a propensity to buy. They have access to 33 billion daily location signals to understand where consumers like to shop and where they live. This data helps to build a more complete, custom audience for each campaign. All the data is anchored to a household for stability and for the ability to scale – to neighborhoods and targeting across channels. With this, Illumis allows advertisers to discover new high-value markets, targets, and ways to reach consumers. It also spotlights the best media – across both print and digital channels – to connect with the right audience to drive commerce. Illumis uses machine-learning for real-time optimization and to continuously learn and improve, sparking further discovery for consumers and growth for marketers.
There are challenges around the fragmented nature of marketing technologies. Illumis’ integrated platform helps to solve those pain points by delivering meaningful multichannel engagement with an architecture that minimizes data loss and unifies intelligence for optimal results.
For example, longtime Valassis Direct Mail Insert client, La-Z-Boy, wanted to drive sales as COVID-19 restrictions were lifted and stores reopened, pivoting to digital ads ahead of an omnichannel approach. Predictive data in Illumis revealed high-propensity shoppers in-market, who the company engaged with through Display Ads and Direct Mail Inserts. Illumis also identified prospects outside the trade area who received Display Ads alone. Digital ads extended consumer reach and outperformed industry benchmarks. Overall, the omnichannel campaign influenced $2.4M in revenue and a 15:1 return on ad spend.
“The discussions, the planning, and the next steps were so professional, respectful and smart,” said Kevin Mauldin, La-Z-Boy Owner. “(It) reassured me that Valassis is still an awesome partner.”
Additionally, Forrester conducted a Total Economic Impact™ study that evaluated the potential financial impact and return on investment for brands using Illumis. Forrester developed a composite organization and aggregate three-year financial analysis based on interview data, which yielded a 110% increase in revenue from ads; nearly 4:1 incremental return on advertising spend; and an 83% increase in ROI – all without increasing costs from previous marketing platforms. Details here: https://intelligence.valassis.com/rs/275-QRU-089/images/Forrester-TEI-Of-Illumis-From-Valassis_March-2020_Final_Updated-20200903.pdf
Driving results and building connections comes down to capitalizing on high-impact moments that deliver the right message at the right time to the right consumer – which requires reaching audiences through several, high-impact media formats. A recent Vericast study found when consumers see an ad in print and online, 52% say it captures their attention. Not only does Illumis help marketers measure what consumers do in these moments, it makes it easier to understand what media drove engagement. Using a closed-loop connection with measurement and campaign insights, marketers can refine strategies and media mix to grow results from campaign to campaign.
More recently, the power of the Illumis integrated platform enabled olive oil company Filippo Berio to increase household penetration and drive in-store sales at key retailers across the Midwest, Southeast and Northeast. Using data from Illumis, the campaign targeted high-intent consumers who grocery shop in-store, omnichannel and use delivery, and the profile was continuously optimized by real-time sales. Consumers were targeted when activity like recipe lookups indicated they were in a buying mindset. The display advertising campaign ran in two flights, spaced one month apart, and outperformed both viewability and click-through-rate benchmarks. Both flights of the campaign drove a 6% sales lift at a key retailer, surpassing the benchmark of 1.1% - 5.7%.
“Working with Valassis and their wealth of data allows us to target [the right] consumers to drive household penetration and trial for our brand in a way that is efficient for our campaign and budget,” said Meghan Boyd, Marketing Manager at Filippo Berio.
Valassis won the Gold Stevie Awards for Marketing/Public Relations Solution in The 2021 American Business Awards ®.
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