Clever creative is one part of running a successful outdoor campaign, but understanding your audience and clever channel planning is just as important. Mountain Culture and oOh!media have proven this with a bold outdoor-only campaign during the ‘Dry July’, a seasonally slow sales period for beer brands.
Mountain Culture took a ‘leap of faith’ on outdoor advertising by switching off all of its other paid advertising channels in New South Wales and Victoria.
The brand wanted to test how effective out of home advertising is when using customer data to plan across multiple formats and dual buying approach, programmatic and the traditional insert order (IO).
The aim of the campaign was to raise awareness of Mountain Culture, particularly to drinkers who were not aware of the craft beer brand.
“We have dabbled in above the line before, in various channels and out of home formats. It’s pretty challenging when you’re not that big, your cash is on the line. You have to show a result pretty quickly,” Mountain Culture CMO Brad Firth said at yesterday’s Powering DOOH conference.
“We were looking for a brand uplift and my personal rule is if it doesn’t have a twitch in sales, in four weeks, we have to turn it off. We don’t really have much more time than four weeks to prove that it can actually grow the brand and have a short term impact as well.”
The campaign needed to work on two fronts: attracting customers to retailers like Dan Murphy’s and Liquorland, and encouraging punters to drink it at the pubs where it is served.
“We were really trying to then bring together what is the best format solution that is going to target his customers, those that he knows is purchasing as much as appease his retailers and make sure that that’s supporting that,” oOh!media head of product and partnerships Melinda Duffy said.
“So that really saw us bring together that combination of street and rail, retail and also office to surround that complete customer experience.”
Records tumble: We’ll drink to that!
The results were impressive. Brand awareness immediately lifted across both NSW and Victoria, and this ultimately translated to sales.
Mountain Culture broke its record for the amount of kegs sold in a month, around 40 per cent on June, while July retail sales were up by 20 per cent from June. Mountain Culture July sales were up 61 per cent in Dan Murphy’s year-on-year, up 111 per cent at BWS and 60 per cent at Liquorland.
Nationally, month-on-month brand awareness lifted by 9 per cent, consideration rose 15 per cent, usage increased 20 per cent and preference jumped 33 per cent. In Victoria and New South Wales, where the campaign was live, sales surged by up to 33 per cent, while Queensland, which received no paid media, remained flat.
“What I was a little bit surprised by was that every percentage point that our funnel went up in awareness corresponded to the exact same percentage point in consideration, to the exact same percentage point in purchase, to the exact same percentage point in brand love, or brand preference,” Firth said.
“So with the format combination you just heard, it’s not just growing awareness, but pulling people all the way down the funnel, and ideally keeping them there.”
Duffy said the key to success was an audience-led strategy that applied a deep understanding of Mountain Culture’s audience to channel planning.
“We used customer data and real transactional data (from Westpac and Coles 360) so we can look at who is buying big, who isn’t, who’s buying frequently, who’s not buying frequently, and then using that to allocate panels as a signal.” she said.
“It’s about leading with the audience as a strategy, and understanding who you’re best trying to target. And then it’s looking at the buying strategies that are best employed to deliver upon that.”
Her message to marketers and media agencies: “Please, for the love of Jesus, stop briefing me on ‘last 10 feet’ (in a retail environment), or stop briefing me with a buying tactic. Only start with who you want to talk to.”
