Innovative targeting delivers strong results for new-to-TV advertiser, Crosta & Mollica

Background

Crosta & Mollica is deliciously simple, authentic, Italian food. In a competitive category that offers multiple premium brands for the same usage occasions, their product range has cut through to bring the best of Italian food to kitchens and tables everywhere.

Challenge

Whilst Crosta & Mollica’s distribution scaled, their media strategy needed to keep pace. It required an approach that would return appreciable benefit to both long-term brand metrics and short-term sales.

New to TV, their beautiful creative focused on communicating the brand values, provenance and showcased a product line-up. Steering clear of their cultural enemy: Fake Italian brands and Italian cliché, they needed a solution that could deliver the power of TV, with the precision of data-driven digital targeting.

Approach

Using GroupM Nexus’s sophisticated targeting capabilities, Crosta & Mollica were able to utilise fully bespoke audience segments that represented the brand’s mindful cook, foodie family, modern explorer and moment maker segments.

These identified audiences were further distilled through a drive/delivery radius of stocked retailers. In order to capture the campaign’s effectiveness, a sales uplift solution in partnership with Nectar and LiveRamp provided a closed-loop measurement of the incremental sales generated through the advanced TV campaign.

GroupM Nexus can reach a new level of audience data for FMCG brands through a partnership with Nectar, powered by LiveRamp. Individual level [offline and online Sainsbury’s] transactions captured by the Nectar card are classified into audience segments [by Sainsbury’s] and then statistically modelled to the full postcode level [by LiveRamp’s data science team] for campaign activation.

We saw an immediate effect to our MoM sales during the campaign launch. As broader awareness within our target audience grew over time, we enjoyed a compounding lift in sales that endured beyond campaign close. Validating TV’s strength in Adstock.

Paul Vita Marketing Director

Results

A Control vs. Exposed sales uplift study shows the campaign was very effective in enabling Crosta & Mollica to reach their target audiences, leading to increased sales and customers versus the control baseline.

Key findings included:

• The campaign drove a 6.6% incremental sales lift for the Crosta & Mollica products featured in the ad; this is considerably higher than the LiveRamp CPG average sales lift of c. 3%
• It also drove a 3.2% incremental sales lift at a Brand level, largely due to a 2.8% customer lift
• We observed sustained sales and customer lift after the campaign period, indicating the change in consumer behaviours is long lasting
• The campaign encouraged existing customers to spend more on the advertised products, as well as driving new customers the brand at large.

Results show that the combination of bespoke audiences built for this campaign were highly effective and drove considerable uplifts on key sales metrics, providing invaluable insight to future optimisation of campaign planning.