A campaign for Hershey executed by Horizon Media won the 2022 Advanced Advertising Innovation Award for Best Campaign, part of an awards program that will highlight the upcoming Advanced Advertising Summit.
The Hershey effort leveraged retail sales data matched to Horizon’s own data platform (called Blu) to create purchase-based audiences. Distinct media plans were designed for each audience segment.
Hershey’s attempt to sweeten its share of wallet by shifting from a mass-market approach to a data-driven, audience-based approach achieved goals including the most important metric, higher sales.
“We charged Horizon with developing a data-driven campaign that would navigate our overlapping brands and maximize growth across our portfolio,” Hershey VP, consumer intelligence and analytics Lynn Hemans said. “Horizon delivered. They leveraged Blu, their identity framework, to identify high-propensity individuals who aligned with our growth opportunities and the results show that their approach moved a significant amount of our spend to audiences who made that purchase decision.”
Hershey and Horizon established a foundation by analyzing category and brand consumption, defining how each consumer needed to be treated and the role of media. The agency then established media mixes grounded in custom audiences, accounting for brand and category dynamics and historical performance. Plans were then validated via Cadence, Hershey’s media-delivery optimizer, ensuring optimal reach and frequency.
After the campaign, Hershey had its highest sell-through rate for Valentine’s Day in more than a decade, despite decreased budgets due to capacity constraints. The effort also drove down CPMs against strategic audience segments for Hershey brands including Milk Chocolate, KitKat, Reese, Twizzler by 3% to 18%, at a time when advertisers were paying 20% year-over-year CPM premiums.
The Advanced Advertising Innovation Awards, presented on Monday, September 12 in New York City, are a centerpiece of the Advanced Advertising Summit, part of NYC TV Week.
The Summit will lead off with a keynote address from Madison Avenue legend Irwin Gotlieb, who built GroupM into the world’s largest media investment company.
The midday keynote address will feature Lisa Utzschneider, CEO of Integral Ad Science, and Tim Vanderhook, CEO of Viant, two publicly traded companies in the hot ad-tech market. Their talk will tackle the issues and opportunities that follow an initial public offering.
Concluding the event will be James Rooke, recently promoted to president of Comcast Advertising, who will talk about the role his company is playing in helping to shape the industry’s future.
The agenda also included panels on addressable advertising, identity, advertising on connected TV and local over-the-top advertising.
Speakers include top executives from companies including Blockgraph, The Trade Desk, Mediahub, Gamut, Imagine Communications, Beachfront, Hearst Television, Viamedia, NBCUniversal, Roku and Comscore.
Also being presented at the summit are Advanced Advertising Innovation Awards for Best Use of Data, Best Branded Content, Best Definition of Target Market and Best Use of Multiple Platforms.
Data Drives Used-Car Sales
A campaign for used-car shopping site DriveTime, submitted by iSpot.tv, won the Advanced Advertising Award for Best Use of Data. Using user-level data, DriveTime boosted return on advertising spending by 26% compared to the prior year. It was able to achieve a 15% decrease in spend, a 6% increase in media cost and a 5% increase in media-driven site traffic. DriveTime also had a 90% increase in leads.
The Show Next Door, a program created by Roku and sponsored by bourbon brand Maker’s Mark, won the Advanced Advertising Innovation Award for Branded Content. The program lifted Maker’s Mark’s brand favorability by 25%.
A campaign for Pedigree pet food, executed by MediaCom and submitted by OpenAP, won the Advanced Advertising Innovation Award for Best Definition of Target Market.
A campaign for Roger Beasley Hyundai created by DR Advertising and submitted by Spectrum Reach won the 2022 Advanced Advertising Innovation Award for Best Use of Multiple Platforms.
The auto dealer got 342% more visits to its website in the market where it used Spectrum Reach’s data and a multiplatform approach compared to another market, where it ran a traditional campaign. ▪️
