[cosmie]

It really just depends. In the case of one retail client, we have carte blanche access to all of their data, from marketing systems to POS data to app location data. It makes it incredibly easy to "lazy load" a lift study after the fact, by looking for anomalies in behavior that are correlated with the creative. Rather than a standard test and control, we can essentially tailor the model to a per-store or per-region level and rollup lift from there. It's less about the spend level and data volume, and more about the data completeness.

For CPG clients, it's more of a pain. Those usually involve really complex interagency relationships, with discontinuity in both processes and data access. And in a lot of cases, they may have access to a retail partners POS or loyalty data, but can't share it directly with us as a third party agency, and there's a game of telephone where we have to coach them on what to ask for and provide to us (in whatever form they're allowed), while being blind to the data and data/system structures. So a lot gets lost in translation, with the spend level having to be large enough to compensate for however dysfunction that process is for that program and client.

That said, I'm lucky enough to be a passive observe to that most of the time. Another manager under my boss is responsible for those more traditional lift studies. I have an unusual background in that I've done a lot of process development work, web analytics, and data engineering/management. So I'm only brought into those projects when we have more technically sophisticated needs.