How Feld Entertainment unifies marketing data with Supermetrics to power data-driven insights and better marketing ROI

Feld Entertainment is the brand behind well-known live events such as Disney on Ice and Monster Jam. We caught up with Jen Whorton, Senior Manager for Database and Data Management at Feld Entertainment, to talk about how a large, global business is using Supermetrics to show the impact of marketing.

Struggling to unify marketing data and showing the ROI

Feld Entertainment produces more than 3,500 shows each year in 80 different countries. They work with ticketing partners that sell tickets to the events. The marketing team's goal is to spread awareness of the shows, which helps sell tickets. They're running campaigns in many online and offline channels, from paid social and search to broadcasting on TV or radio.

As a large organization, they need to prove the value of the marketing spend and show that the efforts are paying off. According to Jen, this was really difficult at first, with their reporting all over the place.

The team had a scattered image of what campaigns and channels performed best. Not to mention Jen having to spend hours logging in to different channels, manually exporting data files, and uploading them to Power BI. This led to the possibility of making errors that risked the accuracy of the data.

The goal of the team at Feld was to be able to look at the whole picture to make sure their marketing dollars were bringing in revenue. To be able to do this, Jen knew they needed to bring all their campaign data into one place. The goal was to keep their data safe and get it automatically from different channels to one place. Having centralized reporting would also allow better attribution.

Jen also wanted a very detailed level of insight and the possibility to slice and dice the data in any way they needed. One of the biggest challenges for a large, global company is ensuring campaigns work in different regions or cities. There are differences in languages, how people buy, or what shows are popular in different areas. You must understand the nuances and how different demographics respond to various campaigns. So, they needed to get more actionable insights.

Supermetrics for Power BI: a cost-effective solution to streamlining insights

Although the marketing team at Feld was already using Supermetrics for Looker Studio, Jen wanted to bring their data into Power BI.

Power BI was chosen as the business intelligence (BI) tool because it's an affordable and scalable solution that's part of the Microsoft Suite. Jen describes, "Even if people don't know Power BI outright, it still looks and feels like a Microsoft product that you could use pretty easily. It has a ton of connectors, and it's easy to get started. Even if you didn't have an analyst, somebody could go in, drag and drop elements, and make something."

Jen started to look for a tool that could bring all their data into Power BI. They compared Supermetrics and a few other competitors, and Jen had a list of requirements she was looking for.

• Single sign-on for third-party platforms
• A tool she could get up and running quickly
• One workflow with import and export that would save her time
• A solution that's affordable and scalable

Supermetrics filled all the requirements. Jen could use single sign-on (SSO) with her Microsoft account and access multiple services with one set of credentials. She could also start using the tool in the same week they signed the contract. She just authenticated all of the tools and pulled data into a query that went directly into Power BI. The process was very automated. Jen could even send the data further to Teams for other stakeholders to view.

Using the free demo allowed Jen to prove the value internally, making it an easy sell. Some competitors Jen compared, like Funnel, were costing hundreds of thousands of dollars to build the solution and was estimated to take a year. Supermetrics' pricing model was transparent and affordable, so it was easy for Jen to get approval for the purchase.

The team has already recognized some future needs, like bringing all their data into a data warehouse. Jen found Supermetrics as a solution that could scale with them for any future data needs.

Supermetrics delivers insights, efficiency, and better collaboration

Immediately after implementing Supermetrics, Feld Entertainment was able to get more actionable insights and identify clearer marketing impact.

From gut feelings to data-driven insights

Jen has been able to dive into the data and get deeper, more actionable insights than before. She explains, “One of the cool things that I was able to do was figure out a missed business opportunity. I had to go on a presentation with the company's president because the sales were not as good as we anticipated. I looked into the data and figured out that we were actually missing a demographic of people that we weren't marketing to. So, on this spot, the company's president decided to adjust. It was so cool to be able to show her these reports, and she immediately got what I was saying.”

Jen believes this level of detail will unlock huge potential for their marketing team. Her goal is to examine the performance and campaigns by brand and see what connections she can make based on the data.

Solving the global marketing measurement problem

As a large, global brand, they also work with international teams and different local agencies. Supermetrics has helped consolidate the data across global and local teams. Now, with the data in Power BI, international teams can view their performance every day. They can easily filter just their performance or compare it to the high-level results, which has increased trust between the teams.

Feld's example international campaign report with dummy data.

Cutting reporting time from 2 hours to just a few minutes

Jen has already been building all kinds of reports for the organization. She was prepared to do some internal selling to get people to use Supermetrics, but she found she didn't have to, as the whole team loved Supermetrics.

In fact, people have been requesting new dashboards from Jen. As the needs grow, the development of new dashboards needs to happen quickly so it's scalable.

Jen estimates that on average, building reports from multiple different sources used to take her 2-3 hours. Now, by using the Supermetrics Power BI connection, that time is cut down to just a few minutes.

Jen estimates that after using Supermetrics for a bit longer, they can start comparing year-on-year data and see how much the campaigns and revenue have improved.

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