How FIFCO built an award-winning in-house agency powered by Supermetrics, saving $70k and 160 hours monthly on reporting

FIFCO is a leading consumer goods company with six major business categories—retail, hospitality, beer, food, non-alcoholic beverages, and ready-to-drink (RTD) products. Its portfolio spans nine countries and includes brands such as Imperial, Tropical, Adán & Eva, Ducal, and many more.

We caught up with FIFCO's Head of Connections Marketing, José Murillo, who shared how their award-winning in-house agency uses Supermetrics for data ingestion, automating reports, and building predictive models. This has saved FIFCO 160 hours a month on ingesting data and $70k in compensation and taxes.

Laying the groundwork for a data-driven future

When José joined FIFCO, marketing wasn't part of the company's data strategy. They had a vision for their marketing strategy but needed someone to make it happen.

José stepped in and started thinking about how to make that vision a reality. They wanted to build an in-house agency with best-in-class reporting and bold creatives.

The first thing to set up was the data foundation. José hired two junior data scientists who started building a data lake, cleaning and automating data, and implementing the customer data platform.

The first year was challenging. Time went by, laying the data foundation, but from the outside, it seemed like nothing was happening. All the while, stakeholders were expecting immediate results from the team.

Introducing Joystick: FIFCO’s in-house agency

The small junior data team, which José calls his “secret weapon”, worked as a laboratory to test new methods and hypotheses on a small scale. They had no tools or fancy resources but a vision and boldness to try new things.

This became the foundation for Joystick, FIFCO's in-house agency that would later grow to win multiple global awards, such as WINA and FIAP.

When the organization noticed that the Joystick team's tests produced results, they wanted to scale the operations. Testing more hypotheses and methods required additional resources. The team needed to move large volumes of data, so it quickly became evident that it was impossible to do so manually or according to José's vision for their data strategy.

The team started looking for ETL tools. At this point, José already wanted to transform the entire organization through a Connections strategy or unifying all data. This strategic approach to media planning integrates brand marketing and media planning into a more holistic approach.

Supermetrics as a catalyst for growth

The team compared several tools on top of Supermetrics, such as Dataslayer, Windsor.ai, and Dataddo. As José had already used Supermetrics and loved the product, he suggested it to the IT and procurement teams.

By investing in Supermetrics, José saw that they could get better and quicker insights and allow the team space to grow in its roles rather than just performing repetitive tasks.

From data to dollars: FIFCO's Supermetrics ROI

José is now proud to say that Joystick's data foundation and working methods have become internal best practices within the organization. What started as a small team running various experiments has grown into an award-winning agency scaled to three countries and an organization-wide Connections marketing strategy.

Supermetrics has had a key role in FIFCO's data journey, including:

• Ingesting data
• Automating reports
• Feeding their predictive models, like a predictive KPI calculator.
  

José estimates that the team has saved significant time spent on reporting and tens of thousands of dollars on compensation.

FIFCO’s continued to develop its original vision—to have best-in-class reporting and bold creatives. One example is building a predictive KPI calculator that Supermetrics feeds with data. José describes, “Establishing KPIs is traditionally a tricky process. The model we built uses 18 months of historical data from Meta ingested directly from each brand's ad account. We employ 70 predictive models that work together to simulate how the Meta algorithm operates, using past performance to shape future results.”

In the future, FIFCO plans to scale the model to all its brands and other channels besides Meta. As it continues to adjust the model and its operations, Supermetrics will remain a crucial tool in FIFCO’s data-driven journey.

Inspired by FIFCO's success? Discover how Supermetrics can help your team achieve similar results. Book a demo today to learn more.

Want to hear more from FIFCO's story? Listen to our interview with José from the Marketing Intelligence Show.