The Process

The start to any competitive market analysis project is data collection. I pulled data from third-party providers like Nielsen and Kantar Media to see competitors’ media spend for kids across traditional and digital marketing over the last 3-5 years. I also pulled our client’s spend and marketing data from our servers using SQL.

After pulling data, the data analytics team and I started to play around with the data and used Excel to quickly create charts. The purpose is to quickly visualize trends in the competitors’ media spend and compare that to our client’s spend. What we started noticing is that our competitors were spending more on digital ads than traditional (television, radio, etc.), especially the months leading up and into the holiday season. Our hypothesis was that kids’ attention spans were increasingly turning to smartphones and tablets and away from television. We were able to find studies that supported our hypothesis, especially for younger generations. One other study we found was that there are more birthdays on average during the summer months. Therefore, it was our recommendation to our client that they consider spending more on digital and consider running ads during the summer months when there was less noise from competitors.

Now that we had our narrative locked in, it was time for me to design the charts and slides. Since there were already brand guidelines at the agency, it was easier for me to spend less time on choosing a color palette and fonts. The fun challenge was designing slides and content to bring more visual variety than just presenting a bunch of bar charts.