Client: Interstate Batteries
Services: Media Strategy & Planning, Advanced Analytics & MMM, Video Strategy & CTV Optimization
Overview and Challenges:
Interstate Batteries, one of North America’s most trusted automotive battery brands, partnered with January Digital to modernize its marketing approach, reverse declining brand awareness, and improve the efficiency of its media investments. With an aging core audience, increased competition, and seasonal and environmental demand factors, the brand needed a more precise, data-led strategy to reach younger and more diverse consumers on flat media spend.
Interstate faced structural, creative, and media performance obstacles:
- Evolving awareness and audience profile: Brand awareness reflected a maturing core audience, reinforcing the need to modernize marketing through video-first creative and a stronger social presence to sustain relevance.
- Video investment mix and optimization: Video across YouTube and CTV delivered scale, with opportunity to refine the mix toward premium inventory and improved frequency management to drive incremental impact.
- Targeting sophistication and efficiency: Targeting prioritized scale, with room to incorporate advanced behavioral, seasonal, contextual, and geographic signals to better align media with moments of battery need.
- Outdated paid search structure: Heavy reliance on brand demand limited incremental growth, creating opportunity to expand non-brand and regional coverage and improve tracking.
- Platform-specific creative optimizations: Video-first creative could be further tailored by platform, expanding influencer-style assets to strengthen engagement and recall.
- Measurement and decisioning evolution: Applying brand and MMM insights more dynamically would enhance full-funnel optimization.
Goals:
Interstate Batteries tasked January Digital with delivering against four core business and marketing goals:
- Improve marketing ROI by 12%.
- Increase media-driven sales contribution by 15%.
- Increase paid search ROI by 15%.
Our Work:
January Digital led a full strategic redesign grounded in advanced analytics, AI, and modern measurement to inform investment and content decisions across the funnel:
- MMM-Guided Media Reallocation: Shifted spend away from low-incremental channels and into higher-performing YouTube, premium CTV, and scaled non-brand search based on Media Mix Modeling insights.
- AI-Driven Targeting Innovation: Built a proprietary algorithm analyzing 59M+ data points including temperature shifts, commute behavior, collision density, and vehicle consumption patterns to prioritize high-propensity geographies and improve video efficiency.
- Premium Video & Content Modernization: Introduced a video-first, platform-native content strategy across YouTube and CTV with improved frequency control and contextual relevance.
- Full-Funnel Optimization Rooted in Incrementality: Modernized paid search and social structures, rebalancing toward non-brand and conversion-driving tactics validated by MMM and lift studies.
- Advanced Measurement Framework: Integrated ongoing testing, lift studies, and MMM-guided decisioning to ensure all activity contributed to incremental sales and brand impact.
Results and Business Impact:
Interstate Batteries and January Digital delivered one of the most significant media transformations in the brand’s history–across effectiveness, efficiency, and brand health.
- 18% improvement in overall marketing ROI, surpassing goal
- 26% increase in media-driven contribution to sales, surpassing goal
- Double-digit improvement in media effectiveness:
