Hennessy changes the game with multichannel advertising

ATTRACTING YOUNG CONSUMERS ACROSS MULTIPLE TOUCHPOINTS

With its rich legacy and exceptional blend dating back more than 250 years, Hennessy isn’t just a cognac brand, but a company that embraces different cultures and communities.

In 2021, Hennessy became the first global spirits partner for a well-known professional basketball league, a move that signalled their joint desire to foster camaraderie via entertainment. A year later, to commemorate this milestone partnership, Hennessy rolled out a worldwide marketing campaign. The campaign’s primary objectives were to celebrate Hennessy’s legacy and invite a new generation to experience the ethos ‘Never stop, never settle’.

Tasked with this mission, bespoke agency L’Atelier Hong Kong turned to The Trade Desk to design a cost-efficient multichannel campaign powered by interactive elements and sequential reengagement, with the goal of increasing ad recall and moving consumers down the marketing funnel.

TAKING AN INNOVATIVE AND INTERACTIVE APPROACH TO MEDIA BUYING

Rather than sticking with a siloed media buying approach, Hennessy and L’Atelier used The Trade Desk’s platform to consolidate their media buys across video, display, high-impact, and digital out-of-home (DOOH) formats in one place. This innovative approach enabled unified reporting, which helped verify their hypothesis that an omnichannel campaign increases ad engagement and website visits, compared to a single-channel campaign.

The campaign started with two immersive video ads that told Hennessy’s brand story, establishing a lasting, narrative-based emotional connection with the audience. Next, the agency used a high-impact ad format to attract eyeballs, and embedded an entertaining element in the ad that invited users to drag and drop a basketball into a hoop, which younger generations found especially fun and engaging.

The agency also took an innovative approach to measuring the performance of DOOH advertising, which is growing in popularity in Hong Kong. In order to attract a higher awareness rate and the most participation from audiences, Hennessy and the agency moved the ‘basketball field’ to some of the busiest mass-transit railway stations, utilising the partnership between JCDecaux Transport and The Trade Desk to target commuters programmatically. After the participants finished one round of the virtual game, the DOOH board displayed a near-to-real-time scoreboard, strategically generating a sense of competition among neighbourhood basketball fans, which created a community ‘playground’ of sorts, where people could interact with the ads as well as challenge one another.

The DOOH ad was followed by display banners to reengage pedestrians near the DOOH panels, which not only enabled the connection via offline and online channels but also quantified DOOH’s impact as part of the overall media mix.

MULTICHANNEL STRATEGY DRIVES COST-EFFICIENT ENGAGEMENT

Hennessy’s multichannel campaign not only successfully reached the cognac brand’s targeted audience at scale, but its powerful brand messages also resonated with young audiences. In just two and a half months, the campaign cost-efficiently reached nearly 30 per cent of the Hong Kong population.

More importantly, it verified the hypothesis that multichannel exposure drives better performance than single-channel exposure. Audiences that saw two or more media channels had a landing-page conversion rate that was two times higher than those exposed to a single display campaign. On top of better performance, multichannel exposure achieved a 48 per cent lower cost per action compared to single-channel exposure.

The campaign also found that users who were exposed to both a DOOH ad and a video ad achieved a 40 per cent higher conversion rate, compared to only being exposed to a display ad.

Lastly, people who had previously seen the video ad had a 36 per cent higher click-through rate and a 42 per cent lower cost per click on their subsequent high-impact ad than those who hadn’t seen the video ad.

‘The Trade Desk makes it possible to run full-funnel campaigns across multiple channels, but to a highly targeted audience in a way that wasn’t possible before. Their platform enabled data-driven sequential journeys across traditional and digital channels, and let us craft richer experiences and storytelling that appears to have resulted in improved effectiveness. We’re keen to use our learnings from this campaign to go even bigger and better next time.’

Gavin Merriman
Head of Consumer Engagement APAC, Moët Hennessy