No Shortcuts, Smarter Strategy: Power Digital’s Tested Framework for Food & Beverage Brands

In the food and beverage space, there’s no room for guesswork. Decision-makers don’t always get the clean, direct attribution cycles that beauty or apparel brands enjoy. Yet too often, marketers fall into the trap of chasing “shortcut learnings”, relying on platform ROAS, a single test, or one-off insights that don’t hold up when scaled.

Power Digital has run hundreds of structured tests across the most competitive food and beverage categories. We’ve seen the same outcome time and time again: clarity doesn’t come from one clean test. It comes from triangulating multiple signals, tied back to business outcomes.

As Jenna Wookey, Sr. Account Director, CPG at Power Digital put it: 

“You can’t take shortcuts with incrementality in food and bev — you have to accept that learnings require stitching together multiple indicators, not a direct A/B read.”

This is the reality for growth-stage brands. The good news? We’ve built a framework that cuts through the noise.

Food and beverage sales are shaped as much by distribution and in-store merchandising as by digital campaigns. An endcap at Kroger, a BOGO promotion at Whole Foods, or a distribution expansion at Target can drive sudden sales spikes, often independent of media.

That’s why Matched Market Tests (MMTs) and over-reliance on platform ROAS frequently fall short in this vertical. Growth-stage brands rarely have the clean data sets or national budgets required to run definitive market splits. The result is inconclusive reads that risk misallocation of spend.

Because of these uncontrollable variables, clean test reads are rare. Traditional media measurement often fails to hold up. Instead, food and beverage leaders must embrace triangulation:

When two out of three signals align, that’s when you can move with confidence.

A national candy brand partnered with Power Digital to build a data-backed roadmap designed to reveal how specific awareness channels drive incremental retail sales.

Our team conducted a correlation analysis of historical DMA retail revenue data to identify statistically significant market pairs. By testing select awareness tactics in one market while holding another as a control, we could isolate each channel’s true incremental impact.
Over time, this structured approach allowed the brand to understand the contribution of every awareness channel individually—ultimately informing a smarter, more efficient digital media mix.

Key Findings & Optimizations

Through disciplined market testing and channel-level attribution, this candy brand gained the clarity needed to invest confidently in the platforms that truly moved the needle, refining their awareness strategy for sustained retail growth.

An organic food brand partnered with Power Digital to boost awareness among its core target audience—moms who are primary household decision-makers with children ages 0–6 and a preference for healthy, organic products. The brand had previously run CTV tests with other vendors that failed to produce clear, measurable results and sought a more data-driven approach.

Power Digital deployed a programmatic CTV campaign layered with complementary digital activations in key test markets. Each activation followed an audience-first, data-driven strategy to reach the brand’s ideal consumer. 

A match market testing (MMT) framework was used to measure brand impact between test and control markets, supported by Lucid awareness studies, Google Analytics lift, and brand search/organic traffic analysis. Markets were carefully selected based on size and opportunity, and a creative retargeting strategy increased frequency among exposed CTV viewers to reinforce messaging and conversion potential.

Key Results & Insights

By uniting programmatic precision with market-level testing, this organic food brand gained measurable proof of CTV’s effectiveness and a roadmap for scaling awareness investments with confidence.

Shortcut learnings are even riskier when consumer behavior itself is evolving:

For food and beverage leaders, this underscores the importance of measurement frameworks that can handle omnichannel complexity. Consumers move fluidly across touchpoints; your measurement must do the same.

Our framework eliminates guesswork:

By weaving these together, we give brands the confidence to scale spend without over-indexing on any one signal.

The brands winning today are those willing to run disciplined tests, triangulate across multiple signals, and act on validated data.

As Wookey summarized: “In this vertical, learnings are rarely clean. But when you stitch signals together the right way, you get clarity you can act on.”

At Power Digital, we’ve run the tests. We know what works and we’ve got the data to back it up. Want to cut through the noise and scale smarter? Connect with us to see how our tested framework can accelerate your food and beverage growth.