Meshh—a Limelight platform—enables brands and agencies to collect, aggregate and report on live data at scale. Live meaning human beings doing something, whether that’s going to a store, pumping gas, attending a concert or just walking around. Without that data, it’s simply not possible to maximize ROI in the dog-eat-dog world of modern business.
“Top of the funnel benchmarking is important because all investments are benchmarked against all other investments,” McGuckian says. “There's a finite pie. So, what is the optimum mix? That is the first thing most of our clients want to crack. We can now benchmark experiential investment, out of home investment and physical sponsorship investment, they are now pieces of the pie.”
Meshh offers answers to the three basic questions every client asks:
Let’s say you’re running the marketing department for a brand—let’s go with a beer brand. Your creative agency is pumping out content across mediums. Your TV commercials are smart and funny, your audio spots sing the praises of your product, your digital ads are earning impressions and, on social, your influencers and media partners are creating thumb-stopping videos that are racking up retweets, likes, shares and comments.
When it comes to legacy media, you know how many people watch or listen to a program and theoretically saw or heard your ad, you can count the digital impressions and, on social, you can measure engagement.
Now turn to that music festival you sponsor. Your brand is all over it. Title sponsorship. Merch everywhere. Brand ambassadors handing out samples. And your product owns the joint. All well and good, but outside of the sheer volume of units sold (and let’s face it, you likely have a captive audience), you’ve got no idea how those concert goers engage with your product IRL…until now.
“Meshh helps companies benchmark live and experiential with other media in a way that's never been done before to genuinely understand the return on their spend,” says McGuckian.
“Increasingly, brands want to understand measurement that isn't siloed. Siloed measurement is only good for the person providing the thing that's being measured; because it becomes a competition for investment, it's not genuinely holistic insight for the end client.”
At a Meshh-enabled event, learnings include everything from when patrons arrive, to how long they stay, to where they spent their time, etc. And for your beer, Meshh measures metrics like dwell time with different branded executions, calculates how long it takes to actually purchase some suds, where and when those purchases happened, and more. Then it wraps it all up in concise data reporting that you can compare to an aggregate of other leaders in the industry.
With that information, you can make more-informed decisions on how best to increase efficiency, engagement and, in the end, ROI.
That’s the value of benchmarking. Yes, it looks backward, but it helps you project forward. Let’s give the last word to the boss herself:
“There is a perfectly good business in being second. Somebody else can land on Mars first. In my opinion, it'll be the second people to get to Mars who are going to win, because they'll have learned from the first people's mistakes. They'll be much more commercial, much more sensible, much more efficient, much more prepared. So, I want to be the second person to land on Mars.”
