Abstract:

This paper outlines an analytic program developed internally at Microsoft to drive greater insight on the return on investment of the $1+ billion marketing budget, resulting in a fundamental shift in planning and budgeting for marketing across the company: Built a flexible, systematic analytic program integrating survey data with other data to create a goal forecast for performance tracking and diagnosis of marketing impact. Provided insights on critical aspects on marketing spend and execution such as reductions in spend. Demonstrated ROI of the program on several dimensions such as impact improvement (6-10%), speed (75-80%) and cost savings (30-40%) driving change at Microsoft.