Global Award-Winning, Always-On Insights Programme: Digital Track
Alicia Dean
Co-Founder & Co-CEO
This programme won the 2025 Global ESOMAR Award ‘Best Use of Data’, awarded Bronze in the Global Category
CHALLENGE
Reimagining Insights
Understanding consumers is essential to building a winning portfolio of brands and products. We worked with BAT, who noticed a need to change the way they approached consumer insights. Traditional sources of insight were taking too long to capture category changes, and didn’t provide a full view of their consumers. To truly understand the consumer of today and tomorrow, BAT recognised the need to listen to them online, where the average adult now spends >40% of their waking hours.
CHALLENGE
Creating Digital Track
We partnered with BAT to co-create Digital Track; a comprehensive consumer, category, and brand tracking capability, powered by unprompted digital sources and advanced AI models. Digital Track completes the picture by complementing traditional research and delivering actionable insights at speed. For the first time, digital data is being used to answer the client’s strategic business questions and deliver timely, cross-category insights straight to the boardroom and to 500+ stakeholders in both global and market teams across 15 countries.
Delivering Actionable Insights at Speed:
Digital Track is underpinned by a huge data-set including over 1 billion searches, 4 million social mentions, and 275k+ product reviews. Our in-house proprietary AI models, and analytical techniques process this data, revealing insight to drive decisions across multiple use cases. Here are some examples:
1. Dynamic & Actionable Brand Equity
BAT invests significantly in experiential marketing to differentiate and engage adult consumers with its products and brand stories. While traditional equity approaches deliver a robust, long-term source of truth, they are often slow and unable to measure the impact of investments. We developed an equity measure based on real, unprompted consumer behaviours to provide a near-real-time read on Salience and Affinity, allowing BAT to measure the impact of marketing activities and take corrective action, all based on live digital consumer data.
2. Foresight Into Potential Category Disruptors
BAT’s new categories have been continually disrupted since inception. In this dynamic and competitive landscape, it is crucial for them to respond to competitive threats swiftly to stay ahead in the category. By using a mix of digital sources, technology and AI, we provide foresights that uncovered early visibility into competitive threats and category disruptions.
3. Consumer-Centric Product Innovation Pipeline
In an increasingly competitive new category landscape, where innovation is driving new standards, BAT is focused on revolutionising its product pipeline to differentiate and delight adult consumers. Digital Track has been critical in providing a more consumer-centric and quantitative understanding of the product experience. Our scalable Pain-Pleasure-Delight (PPD) methodology is underpinned by fine-tuned LLMs. It organically detects granular consumer-led topics, based on nuances in consumer language. This allows us to surface the most important and top growing product drivers, explore market differences, and assess brand performance quantitatively. These insights inform changes and decisions to BAT’s innovation pipeline.
4. Faster New Launch Read
Most CPGs wait weeks for an initial read on their new launch performance, typically relying on delayed sales data. As part of Digital Track, quick-turnaround insights are delivered for new product launches (<1-week post-launch) to provide a first read on performance and enable early opportunity/risk identification. We also created an emotions analysis model using logic informed by a deep understanding of digital data and BAT’s categories. The emotion model goes beyond sentiment (positive/neutral/negative), instead capturing nuanced adult consumer feelings (e.g. delighted, confused, angry, surprised) to enrich understanding of adult consumer resonance towards a new product launch.
OUTCOME
Culture Change
Digital Track has been embedded into the ways of working of global and market insights teams in over 15 countries at BAT. It has empowered the business with a deeper understanding of consumer needs, a faster read on performance, and earlier visibility into emerging trends and potential threats. The insights are informing strategic decisions at monthly board-level committees and bi-annual global marketing strategy meetings.
The most significant shift is cultural – embracing digital insights as the primary resource rather than a supplemental nice-to-have. This represents the modern digital solution for brand and category tracking.
Client Testimonial:
“Curve are the perfect business partners for our digital insights transformation journey. It’s astounding how much they have helped to set up, launch and embed digital insights at the heart of BAT insights agenda. While we were initially impressed by their technology, it is now their insights business partnering that makes them stand out vs other agencies. They opened the possibilities of digital data in an integrated way that is more about addressing our business questions.”
Ankur Tomar
Global Head of Digital Analytics & Insights, BAT