Gen Z audiences respond better to creative that doesn’t overtly feel like an ad, according to the marketing team at DiGiorno pizza. So for its latest campaign on TikTok, it’s paying influencers to create original soundtracks about the product. Because for younger audiences, a brand promoting itself is not nearly as effective as consumers talking about it—or in this case, singing about it. An article in AdExchanger explores how DiGiorno experienced a 3.6 percent increase in brand awareness, 6.8 percent uptick in brand favorability and 3.1 percent boost in sales using this strategy.

The post DiGiorno Taps TikTok Influencers to Create Music Soundtracks About its Pizza appeared first on Chief Marketer.

Hitting the road with a mobile tour can be an effective way to build brand awareness among consumers. But as frozen fruit brand Wyman’s recently learned, scale isn’t achieved overnight. Event Marketer looks at 10 takeaways from the company’s national mobile tour, from the importance of going slow to building loyalty from the ground up to leveling up your media outreach plans.

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Officially sponsoring a major global sports event can be pricey. The just-wrapped US Open tennis tournament, for instance, rakes in millions of dollars from sponsors—which included Cadillac, American Express and Chase Bank this year—seeking to secure a presence inside the stadium.

But there are other ways to get your marketing messages in front of consumers through more unofficial channels. Take Santander Bank, the global sponsor of Spanish tennis champion Rafael Nadal, which leveraged the athlete’s presence at the Open with a brand awareness campaign featuring a TV spot he starred in, out-of-home advertising along attendee walkways and a cause marketing partnership with nonprofit City Year that included a coaching session with Nadal himself.

“We’re not spending the amount of money that probably some of the larger banks would do by being an official sponsor of the US Open,” Maha Madain, Chief Marketing Officer at Santander Bank, told Chief Marketer. “So how do we create a lot of awareness in a very strategic and economical way? Not being in the heart of the stadium, but surrounding the stadium.”

We spoke with Madain about the campaign’s strategic marketing goals, expansion plans for the future, the importance of leveraging partnerships and the challenges financial marketers face, particularly from a regional perspective.

Chief Marketer: What is the inspiration behind the campaign with Rafael Nadal?

Maha Madain, Chief Marketing Officer at Santander Bank: Globally, we are official sponsors of Rafa Nadal. Santander Bank is a globally known brand, more in Spain and South America. In the U.S., we’re relatively new and concentrated in the Northeast as well as Miami. The inspiration from a brand strategy perspective was, how do we create brand awareness by leveraging partnerships that represent our core values?

Rafa is known for his grit, perseverance, determination, commitment to the game and being in the business for 20 years, with all the ups and downs. Yet he’s committed and he’s there. That’s parallel to our core values, [which] are all about helping people and businesses prosper in a sustainable way. Our brand strategy, and this campaign in particular, is about how we create that relevant awareness in the minds of our audiences through these kinds of partnerships—where you meet them, where they’re interested, at moments that matter to them. In this case, it’s the US Open.

CM: Your campaign also has a live event component. How have you used Rafa for that?

MM: Rafa has appeared on social media talking about us and so forth, but this is our first time doing this in the U.S. He attended an event that we held with nonprofit City Year, whom we’ve supported for years. He gave us an hour of his time where he played tennis with young kids and coached them on how to manage life expectations and how to not let defeat hold you back. In our spot we demonstrate that we’re here for the long game, which is obviously what he’s here for, and how you need the right partner to help you achieve your goals.

CM: What KPIs are you tracking?

MM: We’re trying to lift brand awareness. As I mentioned, Bank Santander has strong brand awareness globally, but we don’t in the U.S. The name Santander in the U.S. started in 2013, so we’re relatively young, but we have plans for national expansion as well as digital transformation. We’ve announced a multi-year investment in digital transformation centered around the customer experience. COVID has taught all of us how important digital is. We’re going through a transformation of how we do business and relying more and more on social media and digital marketing to be efficient and to drive our messages.

CM: Why did you choose a commercial and out-of-home as marketing tactics for the campaign?

MM: We’re not spending that amount of money that probably some of the larger banks would do by being an official sponsor of the US Open. So how do we create a lot of awareness in a very strategic and economical way? Not being in the heart of the stadium, but surrounding the stadium. How do we do it with the right budget? As you know, there were very big names within the stadium. So how do we strategically create that awareness? That’s what led us to this out-of-home campaign, where we had significant billboards in the boardwalk leading up to the stadium that you couldn’t miss. We did takeovers of the subway station, outdoor materials and digital to display that message. If we couldn’t be inside, how could we surround it? We also leveraged a lot of our branches in the area with digital messaging on our ATM screens.

CM: What are some of the biggest challenges that you face right now as a financial marketer? And how are you meeting those?

MM: There are a couple of things. From a marketing perspective, how do I create brand awareness when all of this change is happening? You are rolling out new products and trying to address a lot of the activities that are occurring, but how do I create awareness within a certain budget? As a regional bank, we’re trying to build that momentum. That’s one of the challenges, and this campaign is a prime example of how we’ve addressed some of it.

The other challenges we’re dealing with is how do you transform your capabilities so that you are ready and prepared? I think all banks are working through that. We’ve learned through COVID that consumers yearn for doing business in the most friction-less way. They want be able to access their accounts in the easiest way. So we’re very focused on building our customer experience—not only from the physical channel, of course, which we do a very good job of—but also, how do we do it digitally, in a human way? How do you build those journeys to deliver that digital experience so that consumers feel at ease in doing it?

CM: What is your growth strategy for the brand?

MM: We touched on it a little bit, but it’s around how we leverage partnerships that make sense and reach audiences. One of the next partnerships we’re looking at is Formula One. That is a long-term partnership for Santander Global, at Formula One and Ferrari. We’re working with them on how we create awareness of our focus on sustainability as an organization. We’re looking for opportunities like that to showcase these core values: commitment to consumers and businesses, being here for the long-term, sustainability, equality in the marketplace. These are all pillars that we will be focusing on in the next 12 to 18 months to advance the brand message forward until we’re national and able to leverage a strong national brand positioning.

CM: What are the key trends that marketers should be paying attention to right now?

MM: To be a successful CMO, you have to be open to embracing new trends and changes. You have to embrace new mediums, things that are coming up, and see how they evolve. I also think it’s about being very data-driven. In everything we do, that’s the biggest pillar. Unless you’re part of a very large organization that spends a ton of money on marketing, how do you become very smart and surgically invest your budget—because you are the investor of that budget—in the most efficient way? The only way to do that is by being very data-driven.

My advice would be, look at how you can reach your target audience in the most effective and efficient way, and leverage great opportunities. You don’t have to be the biggest spender, but leverage what you have for how you can win in that space. And if you think that way, you could advance quickly.

The post Marketers on Fire: Santander Bank CMO Talks US Open Tennis appeared first on Chief Marketer.

Big brands—even those with household name recognition—require awareness campaigns, too. Take PepsiCo, whose recent brand campaigns have focused on reaching consumers on streaming services and social media platforms through video. AdExchanger looks at how the beverage brand is adjusting to shifting consumer behaviors, leveraging programmatic and tapping into cultural moments to remain relevant.

The post PepsiCo Talks Brand Lift, Programmatic, Measurement and Data Use Cases appeared first on Chief Marketer.

Unilever brand Liquid I.V. has launched its first-ever national branding campaign across TV, OTT and out-of-home media channels to drive awareness and educate consumers about its hydration product. AdExchanger explores the company’s new approach to measurement, which taps media mix modeling, and its unique marketing journey from a Facebook and Instagram-based company to a successful business now primed to achieve scale.

The post Liquid I.V.’s First National Brand Campaign Taps Legacy Media Channels and Media Mix Modeling appeared first on Chief Marketer.

The author of a recent white paper for Nielsen, “Take Command of Your Brand: Long-Term Growth Requires a Balanced Marketing Strategy,” Hirani notes that a one-point increase in upper-funnel metrics such as brand awareness and consideration translates on average to a one percent lift in sales. “You can’t buy what you don’t know exists, and you won’t buy what you have no interest in,” he says. “If you haven’t done the work to build awareness and prime the consumer, it’s going to be awfully difficult to convert them.”

There have long been three primary sources of brand awareness, Hirani says: distribution, regular brand usage and marketing. Distribution is having your products on store shelves or your name on storefronts; brand usage entails seemingly minor elements such as an auto brand’s logo on a steering wheel and a retailer’s name on a credit card that continually reinforce brand awareness on a subconscious level. During the pandemic, as people ventured out less, those first two sources lost much of their impact. But marketing can fill in the gaps. “Use marketing to make up for the loss in the other two channels,” he advises, because that’s the source that marketers can control.

Among the key indicators that a brand’s upper funnel needs renewed investment: “You’ll start to see that your long-term sales prospects are not growing. You’ll also start to see reduced effectiveness in your lower-funnel efforts—that’s a big red flag because it’s saying that you failed to create a significantly broad-enough base,” Hirani says.

That reduced effectiveness of previously successful conversion tactics can help you overcome one of the biggest stumbling blocks to bolstering investment in brand-awareness marketing: internal resistance. Sales departments, executives and investors can be so focused on immediate sales that they hesitate to divert resources from conversion to brand building. “You have to really emphasize the perils of not investing in the upper funnel,” Hirani says. Showing the long-term effects on revenue of this short-sightedness can—and should—persuade them to adjust the balance of their brand awareness/sales conversion investments.

When rebalancing your marketing investments, keep an eye on your competitors’ efforts. While focusing 60 percent of marketing efforts on the upper funnel, as mentioned above, is a solid guideline, “what’s most important is making sure you’re not getting too far afield from the competition,” Hirani says. If your key competitors are amping up their brand awareness efforts with splashy ads, partnerships, tie-ins and the like, you might want to consider adding more resources into brand building as well, so as not to become overshadowed.

Another thing to keep in mind: “When you think about how you optimize your marketing mix, it looks different when you’re optimizing for sales versus the upper funnel,” Hirani warns. Avoid assuming that what worked for the lower funnel will also perform well for the upper funnel. “Sometimes there’s a correlation, but overall there’s tremendous variability in how effective channels are for upper funnel versus lower funnel. Balance is needed not just from a messaging perspective but also from a channel perspective.”

The post Nielsen: Short-Term Failure to Build Brand Awareness Can Hurt Long-Term Sales appeared first on Chief Marketer.

One way the brand is focusing on that premise is through its recently-wrapped, second annual Million Dollar Challenge campaign, which asks consumers to share their own GoPro footage for a chance to win a share of a $1 million prize pool and have their clips featured in a highlight video. More than 42,000 entries rolled in this year, up from last year’s 25,000. It’s become a treasure trove of content for all of 2020 that the brand can now leverage for earned, owned and paid advertising.

Ballard says the company’s marketing strategy has evolved from focusing chiefly on brand marketing in its early days of growth to educating consumers on the features of its products. People were getting lost in the customer journey, he said, which was something that consumer data and insights unearthed. Read on in AdExchanger for a look at how the brand segments its customers and how data informs its marketing strategy.

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The post How GoPro CMO Used Data Insights to Drive Marketing Strategy appeared first on Chief Marketer.

In celebration of Valentine’s Day, Mr. Peanut and Dr. Ruth have teamed up to encourage Twitter users to “submit their most pressing questions of the heart” by calling in or using the #AskDrRuth. The two can be seen in a racy video that plays on the tagline debuted during the Super Bowl, “Always there for you in crunch time.”

Dr. Ruth begins by telling Mr. Peanut, “I love your nuts. Everybody loves your nuts.” They take questions like the one from a man who asks what kind of gift he should give on Valentine’s Day. Dr. Ruth responds by suggesting going to a sex shop, finding a sex toy, wrapping it nicely and then “see what happens.”

The campaign continues Mr. Peanut’s shift to an edgier image tied to its “wing nut” theme introduced last year to attract more guys to the brand, MediaPost reported.

Kraft Heinz, the parent of Planters nut brand, is also in the mood for love. It launched a twitter sweepstakes giving away 150 jars of ‘Ketchup Caviar.’

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The brand teased the promo with a Jan. 24 tweet: America’s favorite ketchup presents America’s favorite caviar. Reply with #HeinzKetchupCaviar and #Sweeps for the chance to get your hands on one of 150 jars this Valen-HEINZ day.

People had just a few days to snag one of the jars by visiting Heinz Ketchup’s Twitter account through Jan. 28.

The post Mr. Peanut and Dr. Ruth on Racy Video for Valentine’s Day appeared first on Chief Marketer.

As the official bank of the Atlanta Super Bowl Host Committee, the brand is activating a number of experiences and other marketing to drive its message of financial confidence.

“We are blanketing the city with awareness,” SunTrust Bank CMO Susan Johnson says. “There are 1.5 million people coming into the city and a lot more people that will not even go to the game so we wanted them to see our brand and support for Atlanta.”

SunTrust’s movement to spread financial confidence began several years ago and every activation and marketing message plays to that theme.

“Financial confidence is about having confidence and control over your money, which our research shows makes people much more satisfied with their lives,” Johnson says. “It’s about helping people learn about budgeting and money saving tips.”

Over the weekend, fan fest, which includes the “SunTrust Confidence Classic” is a free family event hosted by SunTrust and the Atlanta Braves. The event includes the Celebrity Sweat 19th annual “Celebrity Flag Football Challenge” along with prizes, games, athlete meet ups, celebrity autograph signings and interactive experiences like testing skills as a quarterback.

On social, an animated Snapchat mural at The Battery Atlanta uses new technology in the Snapchat app that has never before been used by a financial services brand, Johnson says. The 18-foot high mural comes to life through augmented reality when the Snapchat code is scanned.

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“The mural really takes social media to a whole new level and makes it an experience,” SunTrust Bank SVP, Director of Social Media and Content Marketing Sheri Malmgren says. “Anyone that’s drawn to this is going to know what to do and want to experience it. It creates a really cool animation and also doubles as a photo opp for people to share on social.”

Another way for Snapchat users to participate with SunTrust is its “football” lens that when opened drops a football helmet and jersey that turns the user into a football player. The lens also allows users to choose football uniform colors.

Airline passengers who arrive at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport will begin to encounter the campaign through digital displays throughout the terminals and concourse. And through geo-targeting, Snapchat users at the airport—as well as visitors to SunTrust Park and at The Battery—will see football filters pop up to share with friends.

Throughout Metro Atlanta, creative is featured on the exterior of MARTA buses as well 30 static and digital billboards.

The campaign will be measured by brand awareness and consideration, media value, national exposure and brand recognition for financial confidence.

“To do something as unconventional as our plan for the big game took tighter team work than I’ve ever seen in my career across people in marketing, business, tech teams and across all agency partners,” Johnson says. “I’m very proud of how we came together as a team, how we learned to work with each other to do something that is unusual and innovative.”

The post SunTrust Runs its Own Playbook for Super Bowl Weekend appeared first on Chief Marketer.

As the scale and reach of programmatic continues to grow, marketers are looking at ways to leverage this technology in a new light for two main reasons, targeting and creative units. Programmatic is so suited for brand awareness efforts because it is able to reach the exact right target audience, with exactly the right message, at exactly the right time. And excitingly, new creative options are being introduced to help brand’s messages appear significantly more compelling than they ever have before. .

Take as one example Oreo’s rapid response to the blackout during Super Bowl XLVII. That type of quick thinking, delivered to the right audience at exactly the right time, simply isn’t possible in the world of traditional media. It’s also difficult to imagine a large, insertion-ordered-based, banner-based campaign that could be spun up so quickly.

Many will argue that without the right KPI-tracking and metrics, this technology shouldn’t be used for branding. Even though we can’t necessarily measure the impact of a programmatic brand ad in the same way we track clickthrough rates and conversions, the targeting technology helps use dramatically reduce waste so we can be confident we are reaching a large and receptive audience effectively. Programmatic for brand awareness won’t work equally well in every environment, however, and it’s important to consider which platforms are best suited to this approach and why.

First, platforms like Facebook that are inherently engaging make sense. The recent introduction of Canvas is proof of the potential for brand advertising. It’s shaping up to be one of the most expressive ad units to date, particularly on mobile. It gives brands the ability to deliver a rich and immersive experience to highly targeted audiences.

Snapchat, too, is demonstrating how advertisers can reach targeted audiences with experiences that serve no goal other than to strengthen the bond between the consumer and a brand. Snapchat goes a step further than Facebook, in some ways, by enlisting the consumer in the equation by having them share the branded content with their friends.

Regardless of the platform though, there are some things advertisers need to consider when thinking about using programmatic for brand campaigns:

Evolving KPIs: Marketers need to change the conversations they’re having around KPIs. Brands need to become comfortable with the fact that immature but cutting edge platforms such as Snapchat may not have sophisticated analytics. Snapchat has access to huge under-saturated markets but may not have access to analytics. These platforms should be considered a savvy way to raise a brand’s profile among new and important audiences.

New Creative – Programmatic advertising is fast and furious, and because of that, agencies need to become more nimble about changing up creative and creating numerous iterations around one creative concept. Gone are the days of one creative concept lasting for two years on TV. The programmatic medium demands it. At AdExchanger’s Programmatic I/O conference last year, Adam Berger of Facebook described creating a thousand films for a campaign for Lexus. The campaign relied on Facebook’s rich audience data to deliver ads that reflected the specific interests of target audience members. While this might be an extreme example, it speaks to the importance of creative flexibility for programmatic storytelling.

The Programmatic Layer: Because brand awareness advertising doesn’t have the same types of quantifiable performance metrics as direct marketing, it’s important to frame and consider it differently. This approach is best thought of as a complement and extension of traditional advertising campaigns. By giving marketers the ability to focus their efforts, programmatic allows storylines from different channels to be presented to targeted audiences in a cost-effective way.

The rise of programmatic has forever changed the face of digital advertising. Now that its potential and effectiveness are understood, marketers are expanding its use beyond performance. This is an important development and one advertisers should embrace wholeheartedly.

MichaelAaron Flicker is president of XenoPsi.

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