Bringing measurement in house enabled a global financial advice, insurance and wealth and asset management service to determine how much measurement drove success for creative, media and brand strategies, prompting Manulife/John Hancock to invest in its first global brand health tracking for creative performance.

This move helped the company launch its first global brand strategy in three key markets across Asia, with a rollout in the rest of the world within the next six months.

Chris Potts, global head of demand generation & marketing measurement at Manulife/John Hancock, last week told Data & Programmatic Insider attendees how the company brought measurement in house, making a case to management for an increase in media spend — specifically around the brands.

The previous year, the company brought digital media in-house globally to increase transparency and drive performance.

In the fine print, as a stipulation of getting approval, Potts discovered his team had to report quarterly on the bottom-line earnings driving this business case to executive leadership across 12 markets, he said.

“We had to figure out how to do this,” he said, which turned out to be “a blessing in disguise because there was now a sense of urgency around figuring out measurement for the business case.”

With the success of the in-house media team, it underscored not just showing business case success, but marketing throughout, and enabled the company to invest in a “small but mighty” marketing team.

The group put in place criteria for measurements it could control, but kept an eye on those it could collaborate with in the future. For example, the process of determining a net promoter score (NPS) is owned by a different team, but the two could collaborate in the future.

Pretesting, in-market ad tracking, media-mix modeling, multi-group analysis, dedicated media analytics, establishing a test and learn budget, as well as investing in a global brand health tracker for the first time are some of the measurement techniques the team follows.

“Fisher pricing it” created a “new level of transparency,” Potts said — the meaning referred to aligning on how to capture and communicate the qualitative and quantitative value to non-marketers in a non-technical way as not to use jargon. 

The team realized it spent “way too much on creative” and not enough on media and had too many small campaigns it could combine into a more “impactful larger campaign,” and worked with the company’s finance department to add an approved attribution method.

Planning and in-flight optimization helped to determine recommendations for campaigns. Potts hoped the entire strategy would encourage unit-level CMOs to coordinate campaigns, so they could help each other. 

The move to bring measurement in-house also helped the company learn about its competitor’s ad and marketing-spend strategies within channels. Potts said the measurement team looked at its own diminishing returns to maximize return on investments compared with competitors.

“We’re putting all this together to tell the story why we need to invest in media — specifically brand media,” he said.

Manulife/John Hancock brought measurement in-house and invested in its first global brand health tracker for creative performance and to launch a global brand strategy that will roll out worldwide.