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Brief
Nestlé was seeking to invest in the digital medium significantly for the first time and had developed a specific digital brief for its KITKAT™ brand accordingly. This represented a huge directional change in the advertising approach for Nestlé’s flagship brand and would help to position the company at the forefront of digital advertising in the confectionery and FMCG sectors.
The crux of the digital brief was to apply the brand’s traditional ‘being at the heartland of the break’ offline strategy to the digital space and thus to reposition it in the eyes of a new generation of consumers. This significant marketing activity would comprise of three promotional bursts across the whole of 2009, commencing with ‘Perfect Break', and continuing with ‘Fashion Break’ and then ‘Music Break’ as the year progressed.
In the initial pitch stage, five agencies were asked to consider how a destination website, online creative formats and any other digital touchpoints they felt relevant could fit with the initial through the line ‘Perfect Break’ promotion and a global ‘Stop Working Like a Machine’ creative strategy.
“Nestlé’s brief to us wasn’t a surprise given the fact that FMCG brands are beginning to wake up to the opportunities that the digital space can afford them.” Says Paul Guerrieria, Digital Planner at Skive.
Strategy
Following research into the brand and its positioning potential, Skive devised and pitched a three tiered digital strategy revolving around a destination website.
The first tier was to recommend a destination website that gave users the opportunity not only to participate in the the on-pack promotions across the year but also to take a digital ‘break’ via the use of engaging interactive content. Skive devised one tool that allowed users to suggest their own digital break content that others might enjoy – an idea which Nestlé was keen to progress. A functional music player was also embedded into the site as part of ‘Music Break’.
Participation in the promotions would come from an online entry mechanism – consumers would find a unique promotional code on pack and would be able to enter this online in order to find out if a prize had been won. Prizes were unique for each promotion – ‘ Perfect Break’ offered various lifestyle prizes including international spa breaks and yoga retreats while ‘Fashion Break’ gave consumers the chance to win one of one hundred £1,000 shopping sprees. ‘Music Break’ offered users a free music download for each pack they purchased, with users given a vast music library from which to choose, up to a maximum of 5 tracks.
The second tier of the strategy was to ensure digital creative formats were developed to both drive traffic to the destination site to support the promotions and also to get users interacting with the brand in a positive way. Skive were keen to make the point to Nestlé that such formats could not only be measured using traditional ‘hard’ DR digital metrics, but also ‘softer’ brand metrics.
Social media was suggested as the third strategic tier to encourage a two-way conversation between users and the brand. This would be Nestlé’s first foray into the world of social media so would be of huge significance to the wider company.
Skive’s Guerrieria continued “We felt very strongly about including social media as part of our campaign, as we were keen to illustrate that this would allow the target consumer to interact with the brand and share their thoughts with others. By harnessing this ‘two-way’ nature of the digital medium, we could also better evaluate the campaign and provide further learnings for the client.”
Skive also insisted upon AB testing of the main website landing page to improve data collection and proposed that any data collected should be used to promote subsequent promotions.
Creative Development
Skive developed a fun and interactive site that encouraged users to explore and discover content, all of which adhered to Nestlé’s core family values at every step. It was important that the site was refreshed with new promotional pages, tailored to each promotion.
Skive treated the project more than just a simple web development brief and their planning and creative team delivered a more strategic response. They filmed bespoke digital creative elements concurrently with the TV campaign and created both rich and standard ad formats to engage the audience and drive traffic respectively. Creative consistency across the campaign was also a key consideration.
“A key challenge for us was satisfying the usability needs of each part of what was a broad target audience in terms of usability” Louis Clement, Skive’s Creative Director explains. “The site needed to maintain the interest of digital savvy users while also holding the hand of those not so familiar with the medium. We also had to keep the online element of the promotions relevant to the very different target audiences being advertised to. Where , ‘Perfect Break’ was very broad in its audience appeal for example, ‘Fashion Break’, was much more of a young female focused promotion and ‘Music Break’ was aimed at young people generally.
Media Plan
From a media perspective, Mindshare was tasked to plan and implement a strategy that would generate both brand awareness and drive promotional redemptions amongst the target audience. The rich and standard ad formats developed by Skive were booked on suitable sites in combination with a natural and paid for search strategy. Activity included a number of significant tactical placements in February and traffic was driven to the brand’s Facebook page via paid for advertising support.
Launch
The site was ‘soft’ launched a week before a heavy media campaign ran which included Nestlé’s biggest ever digital spend, driving hundreds of thousands of visits to the destination website.
Over eleven thousand members of the official Facebook group were garnered within a week of launch at the beginning of 2009, with users appearing keen to discuss and engage with the brand. Qualitative research conducted on the page showed positive feedback from the online community, with users particularly impressed that the promotions and prizes were supported by the additional ‘break time’ content.
Results
As the campaign approaches completion, the headline results are impressive. Almost 1 million visits have been driven to the website and there are now over 100,000 fans of the Facebook page.
Initially high dwell times on the site itself have also been maintained throughout the entire year which is extremely encouraging.
Mark Simester, KITKAT™ Marketing Manager says “This campaign has been a huge step for the KITKAT™ brand into the digital space and has fulfilled one of the major tasks within our original brief”. “The promotions have worked extremely well and the success of the site and the offshoots of this activity within social media means the brand is certainly well placed to plan and build upon our digital presence throughout 2010 from a very successful starting point.”
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