Just as marketing has been rocked by new technology and consumer mind-sets, so too has the world of cuisine. Consumers’ focus shifts to the latest trends; so the low-calorie obsession has given way to all things organic and gluten free. In the age of superfoods, peanuts have been somewhat forgotten; a particularly poignant issue for famed legume brand Planters. Naturally, the nuts brand turned to digital—the great disruptor of the age—for a way to cultivate awareness, sentiment, and ultimately, sales.
Challenge
Once a novelty practice, digital marketing has grown to account for the bulk of many marketers’ budgets. From display and search to email and social, digital channels have increasingly dominated the marketing toolset. However, with this increased adoption and refinement of digital marketing comes saturation. As more marketers flock to channels such as video, more consumers grow indifferent to those very same channels.
A fresh take was in order for Planters, so the company turned to Yahoo to diversify its digital offerings.
“Digital has become a very important platform for [our] advertising, one which has really unlocked a great deal of creativity in how we communicate with our consumers,” says Peter Cotter, senior brand manager at Planters. “With digital advertising and social media, we can listen to our consumers to understand better how they actually feel about our brands. The rise of digital has really been a great gift to marketers.”
Execution
“Although it’s one of the world’s most loved brands, Planters found that people still overlooked peanuts as a healthy snack choice and wanted to change this perception,” says Andrew Snyder, VP of video sales at Yahoo. To that end Planters embarked on a new campaign titled The Power of the Peanut. The campaign consists of various digital features, including an interactive website, display, and video ads. The crux of the campaign—and Yahoo’s major contribution—was a platform that integrated all of these disparate digital channels into one unified campaign.
“For the Power of the Peanut campaign, [we] worked together to design a program that combined video and display advertising across Yahoo properties and our extended network,” Snyder says. He explains that the technology behind the Power of the Peanut campaign, which was unveiled earlier this year, aims to bring together a variety of ad solutions. “When brands combine advertising efforts like this, we know that it can increase overall ad effectiveness and even sales—which is what we saw in the results of the Power of the Peanut program,” he says.
Results
The success of The Power of the Peanut Campaign was twofold. On the one hand, the combination of video and display drove a 71% lift in message association, nearly double the effect of video alone and 11% higher than the industry average for message association lift through video. The unified campaign drove a 669% lift in consumers’ likelihood to search for keywords related to Planters.
“By using both display and online video in a coordinated fashion, we were able to drive significant improvements to awareness, message recall, and product purchase,” Cotter notes.
All told, The Power of the Peanut resulted in a 4% increase in in-store sales of Planters peanuts, which amounted to $45 in spending for every 1,000 impressions.
“In a world of constant and diverse stimulus, we need to leverage all the tools we have available to get our [customers’] attention and engage them with a higher impact experience,” Cotter explains. “By leveraging both display and video to amplify our brand messaging we [were] able to achieve both of those goals.”
