The retail data revolution is constrained by its laser-focus on advertising, if you ask Brian Archey, Conagra Brand’s sr. director of data science and analytics.

Clean room data environments are the playgrounds of digital marketers, who use them for audience extension and analytics. But these cloud-based services hold more promise as business intelligence tools, Archey said.

Cloud data is bigger than advertising, and can be used to inform supply chain, packaging, forecasting and analytics and sales.

The Conagra data science team has already shown how cloud-based data sharing can be used for “hypothesis-testing across the organization.”

As part of a beta program, Conagra has been using Kroger’s 84.51° Collaborative Cloud in this way for the past year. The cloud launched to all customers this month.

AdExchanger caught up with the Conagra data wizard, who joined four years ago after spending time as a media planner at Starcom MediaVest, Tribune Interactive (the newspaper publisher’s online data subsidiary) and Cars.com.

AdExchanger: How do you connect advertising data and analytics to your supply-chain management, or vice versa?

BRIAN ARCHEY: I’ll try not to get myself in trouble giving away anything that is proprietary. But I’ll say “advertising” and “supply chain” are these entities that have been thought of separately. If you look at the retail cloud data offerings in the market, for instance, they’re for ad analytics and activation.

We think of it as a circular philosophy.

The old model is a linear model. You look at sales, see a downward trajectory for a product or sales among a certain segment. Therefore, you run marketing as a lever to improve performance.

We can get at how consumers responded to certain marketing content, and the impact on sales. These are the typical inputs for advertising ROI. But those could be inputs for a consumer behavior we want to influence, which could go down to packaging or supply chain. If we can influence consumer behavior in a way we want to replicate, then that comes back to advertising.

When you have marketing, supply chain and sales informing each other, that’s a system driving on all engines.

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