PODS Case Study

Portable on Demand Storage (PODS) is an industry-leading moving and storage company that pioneered portable container service offerings. It offers a smarter way to move and store by providing customers with flexibility and convenience for their unique needs. PODS has been in business for more than 25 years and has been trusted with over six million moves.

With a complex media mix and long consideration period for their product, media measurement can be a challenge for businesses like PODS. This is especially true given their organizational focus on measuring incremental new customers instead of those just attributed to marketing activity.

To help measure incrementality, PODS employed a legacy Media Mix Modeling (MMM) solution. They felt confident in the model output provided by this vendor but weren’t as thrilled with its pace. Their legacy MMM updated just twice a year, making it useful for annual planning but unusable for in-flight media optimization.

PODS began their search for a modern, always-on MMM solution in early 2023 and quickly landed on Recast. Since then, Recast has grown from a lever to unlocking new channel efficiencies into a measurement and planning source of truth for PODS.

The Problems: Complex Marketing Activity and a Legacy MMM Solution

PODS began their Media Mix Modeling (MMM) journey with one of the larger vendors in the space. Their experience was typical of more legacy solutions – static MMM output that was updated twice a year.

PODS’ original MMM gave them useful, backward-looking insights and a snapshot of performance that could be used to plan marketing activities for upcoming quarters. It wasn’t as useful, though, for making in-flight media optimizations and observing the impact of new marketing tests in real time.

Further complicating things, PODS’ old MMM vendor was sunsetting one of their digital tracking products. This spurred PODS to begin their search for a new media measurement partner. They wanted a solution that could provide measurement as accurate as their old MMM but, importantly, could be used for always-on media optimization.

The Solution: Recast’s Comprehensive Measurement Platform

PODS quickly landed on Recast as their new MMM vendor of choice. They also began work with a multi-touch attribution (MTA) platform as they built out their media measurement stack.

PODS initially came to Recast hoping to fill the gaps of leaving their previous MMM solution, but were quickly impressed with Recast’s initial model output, and particularly, with how actionable its recommendations were.

Where their legacy solution offered static and backward-looking insights, Recast provided to-the-dollar recommendations and forecasts to help improve PODS’ marketing performance. Recast housed these recommendations in a dynamic SaaS platform that’s updated every week, not a bi-annual slide deck like PODS’ old solution.

Recast delivered PODS immediate channel optimization wins, notably on YouTube. With the help of Recast’s Insights and Optimizer tools – see demos of both here – PODS was able to experiment with new campaign bidding strategies and creative formats and see, in real-time, which combinations were most effective at driving new customers.

This type of optimization wasn’t possible with their old MMM solution. It wasn’t nearly as granular, so it couldn’t deliver insights down to the tactic level. It also required PODS to wait six months to see the impact of campaign-level changes on channel performance.

PODS has also used Recast to uncover under-invested channels like Google Non Brand Search. With the help of go-dark tests designed with the Recast team, PODS has gained even more conviction in Non Brand Search’s performance and has since scaled spend in that channel by 181%.

More broadly, PODS has come to rely on the accuracy of Recast’s model – validated weekly with in-platform backtesting scorecards – and the comprehensive nature of the Recast platform. As they’ve accumulated trust in their model, Recast has become PODS’ marketing source of truth, and they’ve let contracts with other MMM and MTA vendors expire.

Looking Ahead: Recast’s Expanded Role in PODS

Recast now plays a larger role for the PODS marketing team as the go-to platform for setting annual marketing goals and tracking pacing against them. The platform, with its focus on incrementality, has also been a natural fit and talking point for the broader PODS organization.

It helps ensure that cross-functional teams are speaking the same language when discussing new customer acquisition goals, and marketing customer acquisition costs (CAC’s) determined in Recast are often quoted by leadership.

Outside of the Recast platform, PODS notes that the Recast team has become attuned to answering questions about their specific media measurement use cases. They also appreciate Recast’s support model that staffs a Customer Success Manager and in-house Data Scientist on every partner account.

What’s next? PODS plans to rely on Recast more heavily in 2024 than they did last year. From tracking pacing against their marketing goals, to doing powerful scenario analyses and receiving to-the-dollar recommendations to improve marketing performance, PODS is confident with Recast as their comprehensive media measurement partner.

Do you have a complex media mix like PODS and think your business is ready for MMM?  We’d love to talk.