Marketers have long struggled to measure the impact of brand advertising on sales outcomes. Due to the well-known short-termism bias of backward-looking metrics such as MTA and MMM, CMOs have been unable to demonstrate the long-term outcomes of investments in the brand. This dilemma is now even driving a “race to the bottom” that threatens TV advertising, which is increasingly being compared to lower-cost digital channels on short-term metrics for which TV isn’t designed.

As an answer to this challenge, Upwave is proud to announce Customer Forecast, an industry-first metric, validated by real sales data, that enables marketers to finally gain an understanding of which media tactics are driving future customer growth.

Customer Forecast connects brand metrics like awareness, consideration, purchase intent and favorability with the propensity of a consumer to become a customer of a brand now, or in the future. With this innovative tool, marketers can now tie top-of-funnel metrics to bottom-of-funnel outcomes by seeing the number of new customers they’ve acquired or retained with a brand campaign. Additionally, Customer Forecast reveals the length of time between exposure(s) to a brand campaign and becoming a customer, allowing marketers to better understand the length of their sales cycle and measure outcomes of brand advertising in a way that hasn’t existed historically.

We’ve validated Customer Forecast by analyzing sales and brand data over time across CPG verticals – including multiple competing beer and body wash brands. Our analysis across categories showed that changes in average customer propensity (the likelihood that a consumer will be a customer) in the past are a leading indicator of changes in share of sales today. Ultimately, this finding means that if your goal is to optimize share of sales in the future, then optimizing your brand campaigns to create the maximum impact on customer propensity today is the best way to achieve that goal.