Situation:

OREO the iconic American cookie was facing a few challenges in the UK:

- It was lacking meaning and relevance in an extremely competitive market with rich biscuit tradition and well-established brands.

- The brand’s purpose to create playful connections in real-life was being challenged as real-life interactions dropped severely. In addition, people were now spending even more time in front of screens. Less moments shared = less OREO shared.

- The ongoing global pandemic and ever-changing restrictions and government guidance were making it extremely difficult to activate a brand experience and engage people.

Brief:

We were asked to create a multi-touchpoint experience for OREO in the UK to engage millennials.

Objectives:

Improve brand metrics including relevance and meaning and boost sales for OREO in the UK.

To re-ignite connections in real life, for the first time, a cookie went head-to-head with telcos. We designed and launched a new Network from scratch. The Playful Network had everything its rivals did but relied on human connectivity. As people were now spending more time online, they were also complaining about their network more than even before. And every time they did, we hijacked the conversation to introduce our network and offer our own connection pack. Directing people to our dedicated hub with our products and services, our no-frills device, fastest ways to connect IRL and incentives to switch. Our launch ads were positioned next to the big telcos’. And we did not stop there. We found central locations where our rivals offered poor mobile coverage and asked people to switch to us. And they did. Grabbing our connection packs and joining our network. No bills, no tech, no fuss.

Data gathering:

We leveraged live data from social conversations. We then used specific audience data to design dynamic and personalised creative. Data helped us identify OOH locations with consistently bad mobile coverage. Most importantly we collected user data through the interactive part of our experience.

Target audience:

UK millennials who were now even busier and difficult to engage with as they found themselves juggling work, home schooling and worrying about their declining financial, mental and general health.

Approach:

We designed our experience to be culturally relevant and feel personal. We delighted people with social listening and reactive creative. We engaged with them offline in the brief period between lockdowns. We then scaled with a full telco-style campaign launch.

Call to action:

Through our online hub they were prompted to order connection packs. To engage them further we created a call-to-arms in social for the best connection moments.

Implementation:

We set out to create a fun and realistic spin-off of a telco network. And we wanted the experience to feel personal and routed in culture. We started with social listening. To recruit ‘subscribers’ for our new network we took advantage of the data suggesting that online complaints for slow connections were soaring and hijacked those complaints to introduce our network and offer our connection pack. Then as lockdown was lifted briefly, we found commuter spots with bad mobile coverage and asked people to switch to our network. We followed-up with an epic launch taking telco spaces and even next to other telcos. All activity directed to our network hub.

Timeline:

The experience lasted for 3 months.

Placement:

The experience spanned across social reactive, OOH experiences, paid social, dynamic personalised digital creative, direct mail, media partnerships, long-form content and influencer activity.

Scale:

The campaign executed across the UK.

Business impact:

The campaign generated an increase in real terms of an additional £1.2m over projections – a 31.6% increase. That’s like the entire population of Rotherham, seeing this campaign, then going out and buying 4 extra packs of OREO. Each.

It contributed to 28.1% growth in sales for the full year ending the year with double-digit growth. The largest ever seen in Mondelez UK.

Response rate:

More than 5,000 user-generated pieces of content

All 2,784 ‘connection packs’ sold-out

Impressions:

218.5M media impressions

Change in behaviour:

+8% in brand favourability (FB/IG)

+4.6 pts uplift in consideration (on FB vs 0.2% industry benchmark)

Overall ‘meaningful’ metrics up by 13pts (2020 v 2019)

Consumer awareness:

+16.7% ad recall for The Playful Network on YouTube3 and awarded ‘Best in Class’, the highest possible scoring metric for YouTube’s Brand Lift Study