“Placer takes the guesswork out of advertising. Instead of wondering what ring radius to use, we now know exactly which zip codes are good for us and see what each store’s sphere of influence actually looks like, allowing us to spend our ad dollars more effectively.”

~ Benjamin Marohl, Marketing Analyst

The Challenge

Festival Foods seeks to optimize print advertising strategy in major midwest metro

Founded in 1946 as Skogen's IGA, Festival Foods is a Wisconsin family- and employee-owned grocer that is committed to giving back to the communities it serves and providing guests with exceptional service and value. The company, which began operating as Festival Foods in 1990, employs more than 8,000 full- and part-time associates and operates 41 full-service supermarkets across the state of Wisconsin. Part of the company’s success in the community is due to the effectiveness of their marketing, which includes print ads in newspapers. Benjamin Marohl, a marketing analyst at Festival foods, was tasked with evaluating and optimizing the print strategy for a cluster of stores in a major Midwest metro. He wondered: who was visiting these stores, where did they come from, and could Festival Foods use that data to improve their print advertising strategy and streamline marketing spend?

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‍The Solution

Trade area and visitor origin insights Show Select zip codes Drive minimal traffic to stores

First, Benjamin analyzed the trade areas for each store, noting several low or zero visitation areas ("dead zones"), in each of the trade areas. A simple ring radius approach would have placed ads in these areas, leading to marketing spend that generates no visits. Before the Festival Foods team could stop ads to these areas, however, they needed a more granular view.

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Enter Placer’s Visitors by Origin report. A metaphorical gold mine of actionable data, it showed which zip codes drove the most foot traffic to the stores and which zip codes drove minimal or no traffic. Then, to extend the analysis to all stores in the region, Benjamin exported the data for each store and each zip code to calculate total visitation draw. Zip codes with a visitation percentage lower than a minimum threshold were put on a list and excluded in the next round of print advertisements.

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‍The Outcome

SUCCESS: Festival Foods reduces marketing spend 30% without significant impact to store visits

Using Placer’s trade area and visitor origination data, the team moved from a ring-radius to a precision targeting approach, keeping high-visitation zip codes and eliminating ads in low visitation zip codes. While most of the savings went to the bottom line, a portion of the freed up spend was reallocated towards top performing social campaigns to help drive customer acquisition. The change was implemented on April 12th, with careful analysis to evaluate store visits in the weeks before and after. The results were exciting: the targeted ad strategy reduced annual marketing spend by 30%, with no significant negative impact seen in the visits trends data. Festival Food’s success with the new hyper-focused print advertising strategy has defined a template for future improvements across the brand.

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