Demystifying Data & Taking Control: How Kellogg's are Using Data Storytelling to Grow Brands Globally

Kellogg's is a household name we’re all familiar with. Families worldwide start the day with a bowl of Corn Flakes or Special K. Behind the delicious cereals is a complex business, supplying products to over 180 countries globally.

Kellogg’s was founded by American Will Kellogg in 1906 as a result of a fortuitous accident. After discovering he could flake berries and corn in 1898, Mr Kellogg experimented until he had created the recipe for Corn Flakes. The now-infamous cereal quickly gained popularity, soon expanding lines to other snack items. Production began in Australia in 1924 and has never looked back!

Meet the APAC Marketing Team

Roll forward to 2019, the marketing team in Australia & Singapore now look after both Kellogg's and Pringles brands plus 7 sub-brands across 10 markets, dealing with huge budgets. Having visibility of all the data they need to get the best ROI is a challenge they’re all too familiar with…

With Agencies in control of the campaign accounts, it's difficult for the Kellogg's team members to head in one by one to take a look at performance. Information could easily be hidden in another level of detail and missed out of any analysis. We spoke to Joyce Chang, Kellogg's Digital Manager Singapore, to understand more about how Kellogg's are using data in their marketing team.

Image: Joyce Chang, Kellogg's Digital Marketer, Singapore

Implementing a Data-driven culture

Kellogg's regional teams need a clear understanding of their data to be able to optimise budget allocation & performance for their campaigns at a regional level. The Head Office was keen to have visibility of cross-market learnings so that they could roll out successful tactics in different markets. 

Country marketing managers also need better access to data insights and campaign tracking to help them focus on making sure activities are set up with the right objectives and targeting.

Joyce explains the difficulties...

“With many campaigns running across multiple brands, markets & channels, we had no visibility on campaign performance in real-time and had to rely on agencies to provide post-campaign reports. It’s important for us to have access to accurate data to enable us to make the best strategic decisions. Pulling together all the data that we need at the speed we need it and manually analysing and building reports was near impossible.”

Joyce's team had tried numerous tools to help them manage their data and reporting.

“We’ve used various tools in the past including spreadsheets and a mix of marketing analytics software. They were flexible in some ways but very limiting in others. Pulling in data was slow and laborious and creating visualisations was very manual and time-consuming.”

An example of a Nugit Data Story: This one is a Market Level report with insights like the one highlighted showing performance by audience.

Data for People

After growing frustrated with the limitations of other solutions the team discovered Nugit and have been using the data storytelling platform for over a year. Joyce Chang talks about how things have changed:

“Nugit helps us demystify data. The platform is very user-friendly and offers many opportunities for us to do more with our data. We can quickly and easily get meaningful insights from our campaign performances which has lead to clear improvements in cost efficiencies and content effectiveness.”

Nugit's Data Storytelling Platform combines all of the confusing data a business deals with, uses AI to instantly analyse it and then arranges the important bits into beautiful, consumable data stories. 

Joyce continues “Like every organisation, we have truckloads of data. It can be overwhelming and confusing when you are just thrown unstructured data. To get true benefit from it, it’s crucial for the whole team to be able to understand and utilise the data in a way that drives action. Data Storytelling allows us to visualise data in a simple way to answer important business questions.”

Putting the team in control

Nugit’s unique visualisations help users get a clear picture of what’s going on. Joyce explains how the platform is helping the people in her team feel more confident and in control.

“We love Nugit’s ability to visualise data in a comprehensive way without over complicating it. Internal teams were apprehensive at the idea of a data-driven culture as not everyone is data-confident. Nugit’s data stories are easy for anyone to use and get real value from. They’ve really reduced apprehension and helped our teams embrace a data-driven culture.”

“Now the teams feel more in control. Having Nugit, our people are empowered to ask the right questions and ensure we always get the best ROI. We can use Nugit to stay on top of our campaigns, ensuring accuracy in our targeting by having better transparency in the partnership with marketing agencies. Having clear visibility of things like audience insights through Nugit helps us make sure that all our briefs are carried out with 100% accuracy.”

An example of a Nugit Data Story: This one is a Regional report which focuses on top-level information across multiple markets. The highlighted portion shows a Geographic insight visualising Media spend by Market.

Combining Online & Offline data.

As with most other global companies, the data sources collected and the way the data is formatted and used at Kellogg's varies between territories. Kellogg's relies on a number of different sources for campaign data, including Facebook Ads, Google Ads and Moat. Nugit is able to connect these data sources via API to automatically pull everything into one central place. Other offline data can be piped in where it's needed by uploading CSV files to the Universal Connector. Nugit harmonises all the data so that it works together, standardising the data and format and ensuring Kellogg's has 'One version of the truth'. The different teams all have visibility of the combined data so they can quickly and easily see a cross channel analysis. 

The output: Kellogg's Data Stories.

To support their business goals Kellogg's focus on 3 main data stories, each tailored to their respective audience with a different level of detail... 

The Regional report helps the regional team to look at their budget allocation and performance at a regional level. It focuses on top-level information giving a broad overview of how different markets are performing. When something good is detected in one market, the same strategy can be rolled out and tested out in another market. 

The Market level report helps each Country Marketing Manager make sure that all activities within their market are on track and helps ensure they have the right objectives and targeting. 

The specific campaign tracking reports offer a more detailed view of individual campaigns. This helps team members to drill down into the details they need to be able to spot opportunities for optimisation.

Nugit is packed with Automation Features.

There are lots of features within Nugit all designed to help real people find what they need within their data and use it to make the best decisions.

The intuitive interface makes it easy for Kellogg's marketers to browse stories, discover & share exactly what they need. API connections pull data directly from all the businesses different sources so teams have visibility of everything in one place. AI takes away the manual burden of processing and organising data, creating automated stories from templates in seconds. Natural Language Generation adds simple sentences to each visualisation to describe important insights in a nutshell.

There's a suite of visualisations, each one designed to showcase different sorts of information in a very consumable way. Joyce is impressed with one aspect in particular...

“Being able to get a Creative level performance breakdown has been a game-changer for us and the ability to pull in the actual creative thumbnails gives the numbers we’re looking at real context.” 

“We’ve been able to derive new campaign performance insights using Nugit that we were never able to extract from excel based reports. Using Nugit we can see placement level breakdown of ads which has helped us understand the variance in performance and identify the right placements. Nugit has also been very beneficial in reinforcing best practice for media and creative campaigns."

An example of a Nugit Data Story: This one is a Specific Campaign report which looks more in-depth at individual campaign performance. Nugit pulls in the ad creatives to compare performance, giving context to the numbers.

Big Support for Big Business Impact

“Both Lael and Ying Hui (from Nugit's CS team) have been instrumental in getting our stories up and running. They were very patient in answering our queries and were on-top of resolving all our issues.”

At Nugit we understand that companies buy a solution, not just a platform. A big part of our solution is educating people on the power of Data Storytelling for greater business impact. Whilst Nugit’s Data Storytelling platform aims to empower people to use data for themselves, our Customer Success team is always on hand to offer support and guidance. To help Kellogg's produce the best Data Stories possible, two of the Nugit team have guided them through onboarding. Lael & Ying Hui from Nugit CS worked with the Kellogg's team to understand exactly who would be receiving each of the data stories and investigated the purpose of each story. Once that was clear they worked closely with Kellogg's to build a set of story templates, perfectly suited to each situation.

Nugit's Data Storytelling Platform works for businesses of all shapes and sizes, from Enterprises or Digital Publishers to Brands and Agencies. As long as you have a frustrating amount of data, Nugit can help. See how some other customers are using Nugit.