Quaker currently dominates the porridge market. It is, as one might imagine, a highly seasonal product with the category sales peaking during the Autumn/ Winter months of Oct-Mar. We wanted to tap into and maximise the demand moments in this key period for the brand.
The challenge was to take previous learnings and bring innovation to the Quaker Oats campaign, to ultimately ‘win the winter’ through driving top of mind awareness at key times. Ultimately, we needed to increase sales and ROI for the client
The key insight that the digital campaign has been based around is that we know that sales increase dramatically for Quaker when the temperature drops. Our latest econometrics show that media is 4x more effective at driving ROI when the temperature drops below 5 degrees.
This lead us to our approach of delivering a purely thermo-activated campaign. It was planned to ensure that it reaches our primary 30-65 year old audience when it is 5 degrees or below. This meant that we chose the best performing publishers from 2015, ‘The Weather Channel’ as well as testing TFL and Accuen. The creative was also optimised by using a variety of new formats that dynamically pull in the current temperature into the creative, highlighting that you need a bit of warming up! All ads were planned to be thermo-activated when the temperature falls below 5 degrees, thus minimising budget wastage and maximising on the demand moment during colder weather.
In order to drive trial, we have also tested Blis geo location targeting where our audience is served an ad when in proximity to a Café Nero – they are targeted with an ad offering them to get a complimentary coffee with every bowl of Quaker. Blis created a back-end system that generates a unique voucher code and saves it in passbook/wallet for a user to save and redeem before end of campaign.
The results to date…
The Quaker client has let us know that after the first 2 weeks of activity they have seen a high spike in Quaker sales and we’re looking forward to seeing the end results… We may be the only ones, but we’re hoping that the cold weather continues!
