In today’s complex marketing landscape, CPG organizations face a significant opportunity: unifying top-down brand strategy with bottom-up retail-media execution. During a recent webinar, Bradley Keefer (Keen) and George Musi (NEON) shared valuable insights on breaking down silos and maximizing marketing impact across channels.
“At the end of the day, you’re a business trying to drive short-term and long-term profitable gain… the dollars work harder when they’re working together, just like the humans who are sitting around the table controlling it.” – Bradley Keefer
Driving Incrementality as Job #1
Marketing investments must drive measurable growth—not simply generate activity. For every investment in trade promotions, brand awareness, or retail media, the central question remains: What incremental revenue and profit are being generated? By aligning top-of-funnel brand marketing with bottom-of-funnel retail execution, CPG organizations can optimize their investments rather than managing them in disconnected silos.
Closing the Gap Between Strategy and Execution
The complementary capabilities of Keen and NEON enable CPG organizations to bridge the gap between high-level planning and tactical execution:
- Keen: Forecasts and optimizes marketing investments across channels, ensuring every dollar drives both short-term and long-term financial goals.
- NEON: Delivers granular insights at the retailer level, analyzing campaign performance down to the keyword and ad level across Amazon, Walmart, and Kroger.
“If you make a change in Amazon, how does that affect Walmart? If you make a change in Walmart, how does that affect Amazon? That bilateral halo effect is a massive pain point for all marketers.” – George Musi
Understanding Halo Effects & Full-Funnel Impact
A key challenge in CPG marketing lies in capturing the complete impact of investments across channels. Traditional measurement often misses how one marketing channel drives lift in another. For example, when an Amazon search campaign boosts both Amazon and in-store Walmart sales, the Keen + NEON approach reveals these valuable interdependencies, ensuring organizations capture and optimize their full impact.
Breaking Down Organizational Silos
Optimizing marketing spend requires alignment across media, trade, and finance teams around shared KPIs. Regular strategic readouts bring all stakeholders together, ensuring brand-building and retail promotions work in concert rather than competing for budget.
“You have to maximize mental availability and product availability. If those are out of sync, you’ll either lose distribution or lose velocity—and neither is a good business model.” – George Musi
A Strategic Framework for Success
Consider an organization evaluating incremental investment in Walmart retail
media. Rather than simply increasing spend, a unified approach might reveal that shifting some investment to upper-funnel tactics—such as national TV or digital video—could drive greater demand and improved in-store velocity. This data-driven insight enables strategic negotiations with retail partners, demonstrating how tactical shifts support mutual growth objectives.
Key Benefits for CPG Organizations
- Unified P&L: Every marketing dollar—across media, trade, and shopper marketing—can be evaluated against total revenue, including cross-channel effects.
- Strategic Optimization: Keen’s forecasting combined with NEON’s retail insights enable data-driven adjustments in dynamic markets.
- Enhanced Collaboration: Media, trade, and finance teams operate from a shared dataset and strategic framework.
- Balanced Growth: Organizations can validate brand-building investments through clear, data-backed profitability metrics.
“All marketers, CFOs, and CCOs are sitting around the same table in service of the same brand. A unified data platform means you can push back appropriately on retailer demands, validate brand-building investments, and still deliver on the P&L.” – Bradley Keefer
The Keen + NEON Solution
For organizations managing fragmented data and competing priorities, the partnership between Keen and NEON provides an integrated solution. By combining strategic marketing mix modeling with detailed retail-level insights, CPG brands gain comprehensive visibility into their investments and a clear path to incremental growth.
“We fundamentally believe in a single solution that unifies these siloed worlds and ultimately gives the offices of growth—marketing and commercial—a clear path to incremental sales.” – George Musi
Moving Forward
For organizations ready to address omni-channel complexity, the opportunity to implement a unified approach awaits. Discover how Keen and NEON can help connect brand-building to retail execution and drive sustained profitable growth. Get a demo today!
