FMCG - Beverage Example

Intro

This playbook walks you through how you might market an FMCG product (a drink, in this case) to your customers using CAASie as part of a broader marketing mix. The goal here is to illustrate how you might take what you know about your audience's behaviour and use that to inform a campaign that will reach them at a time and place where you can influence their decision-making.

Note that this playbook only explores the outdoor/OOH component of a marketing plan, and makes the assumption that it is working alongside other channels.

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Scenario

You are an FMCG brand that sells a low-carb non-alcoholic drink targeted at fit individuals and gym-goers. You're launching a new drink flavour to an existing product line.

This product will be available in physical stores (grocery, convenience, vending machines). Your objective is to increase awareness of the new flavour across all your major channels - among existing drinkers of your product, but also to reach potential new customers who are likely to purchase a drink within the next few hours.

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Audience

General insights

You know from past sales that your audience is most popular among young mums (ages 24 - 32), particularly as a post-workout drinking alternative to water. You also know that a majority of these individuals are working - likely in white-collar roles. Some of these individuals will commute to work daily while others are likely working from home (or otherwise not having to travel).

Behaviour

For the purposes of outdoor advertising, the most important aspect of the audience behaviour is their physical movement throughout the day. In other words, the key things to consider are: where the audience will be, when, and for how long.

Since our scenario involves two different situations which directly impact the above factors of where/when/how-long (i.e. travelling vs. work-from-home), we will need to consider these two audiences separately for targeting. We'll look at that further in the Placement section of this playbook (scroll down). But for the moment, let's look at a quick summary of their behavioural traits:

Visualising the two personas' potential movements on a map provides a framework that we can use to inform both Messaging and Placement (further below).

From the maps of both personas' daily movement, we can see that the Commuter must travel further for work and therefore spends more time on the road vs. the Work-from-home persona. Conversely, they will likely travel a shorter distance from work to the Gym (e.g. by foot) vs. their counterpart. Depending on the city, the mode of transport to work will vary quite drastically. For this example let us assume that 50% of the Commuters drive to work while the other 30% take public transport, and another 20% walk or cycle in. Knowing the available OOH formats, We can deduce the following:

1. The Commuter persona will likely encounter multiple billboards along their route to work if they drive to work, however, those who take public transport may not encounter any (roadside) billboards on their route.
2. Public transport users will likely be exposed to advertising at their origin and destination train stations or bus stops.
3. The Work-from-home persona will likely not venture beyond 3km from their home on any given work day unless they are making a special trip, so the available options for targeting during the work-week is limited.
4. Both personas are likely to be most receptive to messaging about the product during and post-workout, since this is when they're likely to seek a (flavourful) water alternative - this makes gym screens highly suitable for this campaign.

These insights help shape both the messaging and the placement for this campaign.

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Message & Placement

As a rule, we must consider messaging and placement together - since the context in which the ad is placed greatly impacts its effectiveness. Ideally, we present a placement-optimised creative for every unique placement we use in this campaign. Alternatively, we can adopt "one-size-fits-all" approach that does not optimise for every placement, but presents a decent compromise to get the campaign off the ground sooner.

From our audience assessment on movement, we know that our placement strategy must include a combination of Billboards, Bus Shelters, Train Stations, and Gyms. From a placement perspective, we have the following insights to lean on:

1. Gyms have a very high dwell time (i.e. time spent at a location) - ranging from 30 minutes up to 90 minutes.
2. Billboards have very low dwell times - especially roadside billboards that typically are viewable for 2-3 seconds during a pass-by.
3. Bus shelters and Train Stations have moderate dwell times - up to a few minutes - depending on public transport schedules.

Assuming we're going for the one-size-fits-all approach to the messaging on creative, we'll need to design to the most stringent format - which, in this case, is the billboard (due to its low dwell time). The question(s) about messaging now becomes:

1. What is the message we want to deliver to the audience?
2. How can we deliver it in 2-3 seconds?

The first question is reasonably easy to answer because we have a well-defined objective. We know that we want our audience to consider the drink as a tasty alternative to water. Given our objective is to present the drink as an alternative to water, it also makes sense to include imagery of the actual product in the creative. Visuals of the product will communicate the 'what' and 'why' without the need for text to clutter the creative. A combination of highly descriptive visuals and minimal text will satisfy the second condition of being consumed quickly:

By optimising the creative for the most stringent format, we have essentially designed a creative that communicates a message across all formats in a one-size-fits-all strategy. However, it is important to note that we've passed a potential opportunity here to use a more engaging video creative at the Gym as opposed to a static one. The trade-off here is between the speed of getting a campaign live (fewer creatives) and how suited each creative is to the format at hand.

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Further Optimisations

One of the advantages that CAASie (or programmatic outdoor ads in general) offers over buying a fixed campaign is the ability for you to time-target in addition to the location targeting that we'd presented above. This is possibly the largest opportunity to minimise wasted spend if we know when an audience is going to be in a given location. In this case, we know that our audience is likely to only be reachable via OOH when they're either on the road, while they're at the gym, or on their commute to/from home.

It therefore makes sense to time-target the campaign such that we're reaching the audience when they're on their commute (inbound + outbound), and while they're at the gym. Within the CAASie platform, it would also be wise to create multiple campaigns - each targeting a different format. So, for example we may create 3 campaigns:

1. Billboard Campaign - Separate budget allocated for morning commute (8am - 9am) and school pick-up and/or homebound traffic (2pm - 6pm) - All week
2. Public Transport - For Bus Shelters, Train Stations - morning commute (8am - 9am) and homebound (4pm - 6pm) - Weekdays only
3. Gym - Early morning workouts (6am - 8am), midday workouts (12pm - 1pm) and weekend workouts (mid-morning - 9am - 11am)

A structure like the above will give us the starting point we need to narrow down where and when the ads deliver. We can go further from here at any point (different creatives running at different times, for example)., but this is a good start. The thing to remember  is that your objective as a CAASie user is to deliver as few ads as possible to reach your audience as frequently as possible. Cutting down the times that your ads serve, along with making sure the message is easily absorbed are two highly effective strategies at getting closer to that goal.