Sharing lessons through brands
Posted: Sun Dec 15, 2024 8:52 am
Travis Freeman is the Senior Vice President of Demand Generation at Inspire Brands, where his teams lead paid media efforts across all of its brands, including Dunkin', Arby's, Sonic, Jimmy John's, Buffalo Wild Wings, Baskin-Robbins, and more.
In this article, we share their perspective on omnichannel marketing, the value of digital advertising for food and beverage brands, and their priorities for 2023.
Inspire Brands didn’t exist 5 years ago, but it’s now the second-largest overseas chinese database restaurant group in the United States. This creates an interesting dichotomy: it’s a startup, but it also has an acquisition mindset and massive scale. To those inside the company, Inspire is a data-first, technology-first company, and everything else flows from that, including its omnichannel marketing efforts.
At Inspire Brands, they do most of their omnichannel work in-house, from upstream communications and strategic planning to downstream activation of their digital media. Freeman’s teams – which include connection planning, media strategy and offerable media – are integrated into a shared service for each brand.
They occupy a central position, rather than being embedded in a particular brand. This gives them the perspective and flexibility to adapt to the changing requirements of their customers.
Here’s how Inspire Brands managed to do just that.
►Meet consumers on their terms
Most brands have a very strict approach: they decide how much money to invest in app, TV, in-store or online marketing in an annual budgeting process, also known as a media mix model.
In Inspire, decisions are optimized in real time, modifying advertising investment according to what works best at any given moment.
This means being present where consumers want to be. It is not up to them to decide where the consumer should convert, but rather it is up to the consumer to tell them where they want to convert. This is why developing a consumer-centric strategy is so important, as doing so allows you to meet customers on their own terms.
Partly because of this consumer orientation, they don’t think in terms of programmatic, social, search or CTV, but rather in terms of media. If a particular CTV channel does well, they can quickly move all of their ad buys — or at least a large portion of them — to that platform. This process is easier because they make those decisions internally and plan to continue to add more media activities that can be bid on.
In fact, Freeman’s team often feels like a team of traders , scanning multiple monitors and optimizing ad spend in real time based on what’s performing at that particular moment. But they couldn’t do that if they didn’t have a single, very specific KPI to measure, which must be agreed upon before the campaign launches. At Inspire Brands, everything they do is tied to return on ad spend (ROAS).
Their omnichannel strategy wouldn’t be possible without a unified approach to data. Over the past two years, they’ve worked to create a single technology platform for their family of brands. This data backbone allows all of Inspire Brands’ brands to operate as one, using the same infrastructure to reach consumers where they’re actually shopping. This means they can accelerate their omnichannel marketing initiatives much faster than many of their competitors.
Their goal is to think about how best to spend every dollar, and they make these decisions through the lens of Inspire, rather than the narrower lens of their individual brands. When they have a brand that is best-in-class from a digital standpoint, their centralized model means they can convince their other brands to follow suit. This way, they can take learnings from Buffalo Wild Wings, for example, and apply them to Arby’s or Dunkin’.
In this article, we share their perspective on omnichannel marketing, the value of digital advertising for food and beverage brands, and their priorities for 2023.
Inspire Brands didn’t exist 5 years ago, but it’s now the second-largest overseas chinese database restaurant group in the United States. This creates an interesting dichotomy: it’s a startup, but it also has an acquisition mindset and massive scale. To those inside the company, Inspire is a data-first, technology-first company, and everything else flows from that, including its omnichannel marketing efforts.
At Inspire Brands, they do most of their omnichannel work in-house, from upstream communications and strategic planning to downstream activation of their digital media. Freeman’s teams – which include connection planning, media strategy and offerable media – are integrated into a shared service for each brand.
They occupy a central position, rather than being embedded in a particular brand. This gives them the perspective and flexibility to adapt to the changing requirements of their customers.
Here’s how Inspire Brands managed to do just that.
►Meet consumers on their terms
Most brands have a very strict approach: they decide how much money to invest in app, TV, in-store or online marketing in an annual budgeting process, also known as a media mix model.
In Inspire, decisions are optimized in real time, modifying advertising investment according to what works best at any given moment.
This means being present where consumers want to be. It is not up to them to decide where the consumer should convert, but rather it is up to the consumer to tell them where they want to convert. This is why developing a consumer-centric strategy is so important, as doing so allows you to meet customers on their own terms.
Partly because of this consumer orientation, they don’t think in terms of programmatic, social, search or CTV, but rather in terms of media. If a particular CTV channel does well, they can quickly move all of their ad buys — or at least a large portion of them — to that platform. This process is easier because they make those decisions internally and plan to continue to add more media activities that can be bid on.
In fact, Freeman’s team often feels like a team of traders , scanning multiple monitors and optimizing ad spend in real time based on what’s performing at that particular moment. But they couldn’t do that if they didn’t have a single, very specific KPI to measure, which must be agreed upon before the campaign launches. At Inspire Brands, everything they do is tied to return on ad spend (ROAS).
Their omnichannel strategy wouldn’t be possible without a unified approach to data. Over the past two years, they’ve worked to create a single technology platform for their family of brands. This data backbone allows all of Inspire Brands’ brands to operate as one, using the same infrastructure to reach consumers where they’re actually shopping. This means they can accelerate their omnichannel marketing initiatives much faster than many of their competitors.
Their goal is to think about how best to spend every dollar, and they make these decisions through the lens of Inspire, rather than the narrower lens of their individual brands. When they have a brand that is best-in-class from a digital standpoint, their centralized model means they can convince their other brands to follow suit. This way, they can take learnings from Buffalo Wild Wings, for example, and apply them to Arby’s or Dunkin’.