Search for:

#MetaMarketingMasterminds Special Section

#MarketingMasterminds: Mondelez: 5Star

This month's Marketing Mastermind is Binita Jhina, Media Manager for South and West Africa at Mondelez, responsible for the Chocolate, Biscuit, and Gum and Candy categories. She discusses how Cadbury drove brand awareness and sales of the 5Star chocolate bar through a Facebook and Instagram campaign.
Binita Jhina
Binita Jhina

What were you trying to achieve with this campaign?

As one of the world’s biggest and best-known chocolate brands, Cadbury, which is owned by Mondelez, wanted to drive brand equity around 5Star, a chewy caramel, crunchy biscuit bar covered in Cadbury Dairy Milk chocolate.

Since 5Star is a fairly new product in South Africa, we wondered if we’d get better results if we created multiple personalised creative ads that are specific to people’s interests, rather than creating one broadly targeted ad.

For example, music and gaming are two of the top interests among our target market, so we decided to test our theory that targeted and personalised creatives would perform better than generic ads.

If you read nothing else:

Goal: To increase brand equity around Cadbury’s 5Star chocolate bar using Facebook and Instagram.

Method: Personalised creative ads targeted at audiences interested in gaming and music, run alongside a generic ad targeting a broader audience. We used a blend of controlled and automatic ad placement strategies, as well as a brand lift study to poll audiences on ad recall, brand awareness, and message association.

Results: The campaign reached 5.6 million people. We recorded a 27-point lift in ad recall among people exposed to the themed ads, and a 21-point lift among those exposed to the generic ad. There was also a four-point lift in purchase intent among people exposed to themed ads.

Learnings: Personalised ad targeting works when used with optimised creative assets.

So, you created multiple creatives?

Yes, we created two themed ads: one targeted at music lovers and the other at gamers.

We wanted to tie the creatives back to our tagline: “Get Lost in the Taste”. So, for music lovers, we created short clips of people getting lost in music while eating a 5Star chocolate bar. For the gamers, we created clips of someone getting lost in space, catching pieces of chocolate – Pacman-style – in a zero-gravity rocket ship.

For purposes of comparison, we also ran a generic campaign for the 5Star chocolate bar and delivered it broadly across Facebook and Instagram to people in the same age range.

The biggest difference was that the themed video ads were created to appeal to people with specific interests, while the generic ads focused on the product and a broader target audience.

How did you go about setting up that test?

We wanted to test if the personalised ads performed better in driving awareness and sales than the generic ad. So, we set up 2 campaigns:

The first campaign, with one set of creative assets, targeted a broad audience of males and females, aged 16 to 45.

The second campaign was more personalised and included three sets of creative assets:

  • One targeted at males and females, aged 16 – 45, who are interested in gaming,
  • One targeted at males and females, aged 16 – 45, who are interested in music, and
  • One targeted at males and females, aged 16 – 45, excluding gaming and music interests, to ensure similar reach across campaigns.

We used a blend of Facebook’s controlled and automatic approaches. We used the reach and frequency buying method for predictable, optimised reach. We also used Facebook’s automatic placements functionality, so that ads would be shown to our target audience in the places they're likely to perform best.

We measured results through a Facebook brand lift study, which automatically creates test and control groups and then polls people in both groups about topics such as ad recall, brand awareness, and message association.

And did you prove your theory?

Yes, I believe we did.

Overall the campaign was very successful in driving brand awareness. As we suspected, the personalised video ads aimed at gamers and music fans performed much better than the generic campaign.

The campaign results included:

  • A 27-point lift in ad recall among people exposed to the themed ads,
  • A 21-point lift in ad recall among people exposed to the generic ad,
  • A four-point lift in purchase intent among people exposed to themed ads, and
  • We reached 5.6 million people.

These are phenomenal numbers for us. Purchase intent is an especially hard metric to influence, so we’re very happy with this result.

Amazing campaign with amazing results! Tell us one thing your team learned from this?

We confirmed what everyone has been talking about – that personalisation works when brands run effective creatives that are optimised for Facebook. This is what leads to lifts in ad recall and purchase intent.

We also found that achieving these results is a collaborative effort between all parties – brand teams, media agencies, creative agencies, and our platform partners. Without this combined effort, the campaign would not have achieved the desired result.

Let's do Biz