Waking up results with Quaker Oats and online video
Overview
Quaker Oats is a brand with centuries of history and heritage, and a longstanding category leader in markets around the world.
Yet for many years its brand platform and communications have been disparate, with own-brand labels squeezing its share.
Meanwhile global nutrition trends were helping drive awareness of breakfast as the most important meal of the day. But while the number of breakfast occasions were increasing, the cereal category was in decline. What’s more, people didn’t understand the benefits of oats and they were not front-of-mind as a breakfast choice.
Quaker, AMV BBDO and OMD set out to change this. The target audience was those who wanted to make a step towards a healthier life. They worked with YouTube to reinvigorate the brand and make oats the breakfast of choice, by utilising the power of mass customisation to target people with messages relevant to their health and wellness needs.
In adopting this narrowcast approach, the brand saw an uplift of 122% in brand interest, as well as an increase in product interest, purchase intent and consideration.
The results of the data-driven approach are now providing actionable insights that can be used to drive media effectiveness among PepsiCo's other markets and brands.
What was the role of digital within the media mix?
Search and interest behaviour were key. Paid search across Google ensured the brand appeared at the top of health queries relating to its claims.
Previously Quaker Oats had targeted a large-scale demographic with a generic message. Now it wanted to base its targeting on a nutrition engaged segmentation.
It was via narrowcasting that the brand could best target individuals. The team mapped segments in YouTube’s audiences, developing multiple ad variations to dynamically reach consumers with contextually relevant messages.
Using YouTube campaign settings, Quaker also set up dayparting to serve the most relevant ad at the right point of the day.
Key statistics
What results did you attain? What was the biggest achievement?
PepsiCo UK ran a head-to-head test to measure how the new digital-first approach performed against a standard demographic-based YouTube campaign, using generic bumper ads.
The data-driven approach using personalisation at scale outperformed Quaker's generic targeting campaigns, with the former beating the latter in both upper and lower funnel brand lift metrics. The strategy delivered a 2.3% higher sales lift compared to a standard approach.
The use of narrowcast also drove significant results across all metrics tracked in the Brand Lift survey. This included a 51% uplift in ad recall; an 8.5% lift in consideration and a 17.4% lift in purchase intent. In addition, there was a 122.3% lift in brand interest for Quaker and a 37.5% lift in product interest of oats.
It was found that users were using YouTube to learn more about Quaker and using Google Search to look for information about oats as a product.
In a sentence...
How YouTube demonstrated the power of a Quaker Oats-fuelled breakfast, leading to improved ad recall, consideration, brand interest and sales.
