In an industry-first campaign, Mars Wrigley, in collaboration with Amazon Australia and EssenceMediacom, leveraged the power of Amazon’s generative AI technology to recognise and reward Australians for their everyday achievements.
The campaign platform ‘For You Who Did That Thing You Did’ was implemented across Amazon touchpoints to unlock meaningful connections with relevant audiences, extending the MARS Bar brand platform with a unique experience for Amazon Australia customers.
A custom-built AI solution integrated within Amazon.com.au and powered by Amazon Bedrock, AWS’s fully managed generative AI service, was trained to qualify everyday victories shared by Amazon customers and recognise small but significant wins with a free MARS Bar included in their next Amazon.com.au delivery.
During its seven-week run the campaign attracted 57,558 total submissions, of which 30,579 (over half) were deemed by Amazon Bedrock to be “Things” customers did. Successful “Things” included “rearranged the spice cabinet by colour and flavour,” “trained my cat to fetch snacks from the kitchen,” “sorted Christmas shopping before August,” and “first gym class since having a baby!”
Mars Wrigley in collaboration with EssenceMediacom, conceptualised the campaign with Amazon Ads’ Brand Innovation Lab, a global team of strategists, creatives, and technologists who work with brands to pioneer custom campaigns that span Amazon’s broad range of channels and touchpoints to push the boundaries of innovation and audience engagement.
To help Mars Wrigley find new and innovative ways to connect with their core audiences, a personalisation-at-scale campaign drove relevant creative across Prime Video, which has an average monthly ad-supported reach of more than 5 million customers in Australia. The campaign also appeared on the Amazon.com.au homepage, customer emails, onsite display ads, and delivery packaging, creating a compelling customer experience that drove impact throughout a shopper’s journey.
Richard Weisinger, head of brand and content at Mars Wrigley Australia, emphasises the brand’s commitment to innovative audience engagement through compelling storytelling.
“This campaign harnessed Amazon’s first-party signals to deliver personalised messages at scale across multiple touchpoints, reaching hard-to-reach audiences with relevant campaign creative at the time they completed ‘a Thing.’ Amazon Bedrock then allowed audiences the opportunity to interact with our brand platform.
We recognised Amazon’s presence in the everyday lives of Australians – its powerful combination of content, reach, and adtech allowed us to connect our audience to our brand platform through the entire funnel. Delivering not only our brand message in a highly relevant way at the right time, but also helping to physically deliver a sweet treat to our audience with their next purchase.”
Weisinger also noted the impact of Amazon’s unique full-funnel offering for brands.
“By advertising across a mix of Amazon channels we created a truly compelling brand experience that drove awareness, consideration, and conversions. The results delivered significant uplifts in brand awareness, ad recall and even product sales, but more importantly it truly brought our campaign platform to life, delivering MARS Bars directly to Australian households across the country.”
“Mars Wrigley’s willingness to embrace emerging technologies exemplifies the kind of forward-thinking innovation our Brand Innovation Lab was designed to foster—an environment where marketers can take calculated risks, explore new storytelling approaches, and ultimately forge deeper connections with their audiences. What made this campaign special was how thoughtfully the brand applied Amazon Bedrock’s generative AI capabilities to evolve what a great customer experience can look like – in this case, celebrating the everyday moments that matter to our shared customers,” said Chris Wilson, head of Amazon Ads’ Brand Innovation Lab, Australia and Middle East and North Africa.
“By integrating this technology across multiple touchpoints and leveraging Amazon’s trillions of first-party shopping, browsing, and streaming signals that help brands connect to their relevant audiences, we created a seamless, personalised experience that resonated deeply with consumers and established authentic connections for the brand. The strong results across brand metrics and sales performance demonstrate how brands can maximise Amazon’s full-funnel approach to create meaningful connections at scale, making shopping more relevant, enjoyable, and even delicious for customers who now have a MARS Bar in their hands”.
The campaign drove significant brand and business impact for Mars Wrigley:
- Clear uplift in offline product sales of 4.3%
- Campaign drove a 4.8% increase in ad recall among core audiences versus the control group
- 60% of unique visitors on the brand store were new-to-brand with an average dwell time of 73.16 seconds
- Boosted brand awareness to 92%, a significant 2% increase for a household name brand
- Overall Mars Wrigley sales on Amazon increased by 67% during the campaign period compared to monthly average
It also produced particularly strong results among the traditionally hard-to-reach young adult cohort, a core audience for Mars Wrigley:
- Ad recall of 11.1%
- Brand awareness and favourability lift both at 3.7%
- Email open rate of 57%
- Click-through rate of 6.66% against a benchmark of 4.5%
“For You Who Did That Thing You Did” ran from August 26 to October 9 2024.
