A campaign for Hershey executed by Horizon Media won the 2022 Advanced Advertising Innovation Award for Best Campaign.
The campaign leveraged sales data at the shop-keeping unit (SKU) level and matched it to Horizon’s deterministic identity framework–blu–to create purchase-based audiences. Distinct media plans were designed for each audience segment.
The Advanced Advertising Innovation Awards will be presented on September 12 in New York at the Advanced Advertising Summit.
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Hershey’s attempt to sweeten its share of wallet achieved goals including the most important KPI, sales.
“We charged Horizon with developing a data-driven campaign that would navigate our overlapping brands and maximize growth across our portfolio. 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,” said Lynn Hemans, VP, consumer intelligence & analytics at Hershey.
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/category dynamics and historical performance. Plans were then validated via Cadence, Hershey’s media delivery optimizer, ensuring optimal reach and frequency.
As a result of the campaign, Hershey had its highest sell-through rate for Valentine’s Day in over 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. ■
