Nestlé’s global "Start Healthy, Stay Healthy" (SHSH) focuses on baby’s health during their first 1000 days, including the first 300 nurtured inside mothers' bellies. Our 2019 challenge in Taiwan: recruit 36,000 moms in early pregnancy to sign up on SHSH website and claim trial packs.

The need for optimal nutrition starts from the moment of conception, so Nestlé needed to engage these women long before they “went public”. Even though new moms-to-be keep their news a secret, they are still actively preparing for their new arrival – shopping (buying maternity wear and baby products), asking and visiting their doctor for check-ups and advice, and following influencers online.

Because Nestlé’s prenatal products are best consumed during the first 300 days of pregnancy, we needed to find these new moms-to-be fast to ensure they’re giving their unborn baby the healthiest start possible. But how do you find someone who is actively trying to stay hidden?

Our strategy was to find the "signals" from moms in the early stages of their pregnancy by collecting them from their footprints – both on and offline.

Identifying early-pregnancy women was not an easy task. Using advanced analytics, we tapped three key sources to identify and reach these women:

1) Geographically identify them using data from taxi and ride-hailing apps dropping passengers at prenatal clinics.

2) We then mapped this against mobile commerce and app data that showed purchases of maternity and baby products, and then cross-referenced social profiles to deliver more focused targeting and expanded Google keyword tracking.

3) Connected with pregnancy and neonatal influencers and opinion leaders, leveraging their social followings and allocating budget according to relative size.

We combined all three sources to hone-in with laser focus with moms-to-be before they had announced their news.

By using data, we found a hidden target audience - and it worked!

Nearly half (48%) of all pregnant women in Taiwan, meaning 1 out of every 2 moms, joined Nestlé Infant SHSH project! That’s 40,000 new moms and Taiwanese babies that had better nutrition in the past half year.

Conversions increased 15% year-over-year, resulting in a CPA savings of 21%.

This case is a pilot campaign ran by Google x Nestle global, and is selected to be the Taiwan showcase in "Think with Google" and shared in Google global meetings.

These moms could remain silent, but we made sure they heard our message.