Hennessy crafts success with omnichannel campaign
GETTING AUSTRALIAN AUDIENCES INTO THE SPIRIT BY LEVERAGING A GLOBAL CAMPAIGN
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. In Australia, its local team leveraged the global partnership by driving engagement on the ‘Hennessy Floating Basketball Court’ campaign on Sydney Harbour and promote bottles.
Hennessy and its agency, bespoke GroupM firm L’Atelier, had previously run campaigns on multiple channels separately. Recognising the need to gain a holistic view across all channels and optimise their campaigns through programmatic advertising, Hennessy and L’Atelier turned to The Trade Desk to help deliver an omnichannel campaign.
CHANGING UP THE GAME WITH OPTIMISED TARGETING AND AD SPEND
To drive upper-, mid-, and lower-funnel results, the campaign team at L’Atelier and GroupM’s programmatic buying unit, Assemblage, used a combination of display, high-impact rich media, online video (OLV), and local broadcast video on demand (BVOD) across the open internet.
To reach their target audience across these channels, Australian and global creative teams produced a range of ads delivered across multiple channels programmatically via The Trade Desk’s platform. The campaign team also used first- and third-party data, including shopper data from Flybuys for audience targeting. This targeting was further optimised during the campaign using KoaTM, The Trade Desk’s artificial intelligence (AI) tool.
Hennessy’s and L’Atelier’s teams were impressed by the unprecedented level of granularity in the metrics provided by The Trade Desk’s platform. They were able to identify which ads were most effective – in terms of both branding and campaign performance – in near real time.
Throughout the campaign, The Trade Desk worked in partnership with the Assemblage team in a consultative role to analyse the data and provide recommendations on optimisation strategies. Hennessy agreed to take a flexible approach to the allocation of its campaign budgets. This allowed the campaign team to continually optimise its ad spend by shifting budgets from lower-performing to high-performing formats and creatives on the fly.
TAKING A CLOSER LOOK AT BRAND AWARENESS AND CAMPAIGN PERFORMANCE
To understand the campaign’s impact on brand awareness, the team conducted a brand lift study using a panel-based measurement solution from The Trade Desk’s partner, Lucid (a Cint Group Company). A key aim was to measure how the frequency of ad views impacted brand awareness.
The study identified the level of frequency and type of ads for optimal brand uplift. This enabled the team to set precise frequency goals and caps across multiple channels to boost brand awareness.
To further optimise campaign performance, the team tapped in to the attention intelligence platform Playground XYZ, another partner of The Trade Desk. This platform measures the length of time consumers look at an ad in seconds. It is trained and verified by eye-tracking data from consenting users, and utilises AI to measure audience attention times at scale.
RAISING THE BAR FOR REACH AND CONVERSION RATES
Using The Trade Desk’s platform to manage omnichannel frequency holistically, Hennessy reached an additional 530,000 unique individuals and reduced its cost per reach by 15 per cent.
The Trade Desk’s search and social impact report allowed Hennessy to witness the positive impact of its upper-funnel programmatic activity on clicks via search and social media. This report illustrated that prior exposure to programmatic ads delivered through The Trade Desk resulted in conversion rates increasing by 327 per cent on search and 293 per cent on social media.
Furthermore, a cross-media study conducted by MetrixLab discovered that programmatic display and BVOD through The Trade Desk’s platform were more cost-efficient than social, as they achieved similar reach and impact. Most significantly, display delivered the best performance at the lowest spend of 3 per cent amongst all channels.
The omnichannel strategy also proved its effectiveness in reducing the time to conversion by up to 71.4 per cent. For example, consumers who clicked through to the landing page did so in just two days, on average, when exposed to the Hennessy ads via four channels. This compared to seven days for consumers exposed via a single channel. Also, consumers were 58 per cent quicker to make an ‘add to cart’ transaction on Hennessy’s consumer-facing website if exposed to ads on two or more channels, as compared to single channel.
The Lucid brand lift study showed a 5 per cent increase in purchase intent amongst consumers exposed to video ads at least 10 times. The cross-media study further proved the value of an omnichannel strategy, particularly with the combination of social, BVOD, and display. Consumers who were exposed to all three channels demonstrated the most impressive lifts: 3.6 times in spontaneous awareness, 3.5 times for preference, and a jump from 0 per cent to 17 per cent for recommendation as compared to unexposed users.
Meanwhile, using the Playground XYZ’s Attention Intelligence platform, Hennessy captured substantial increases in audience attention times across all ad strategies. For example, attention time increased from 0.19 seconds (achieved from the display standard banner) to 3.67 seconds (high-impact display), generating an additional 6 days’ worth of attention time on the campaign.
SETTING A RECORD FOR EFFECTIVENESS WITH PROGRAMMATIC OMNICHANNEL STRATEGY
For the first time, Hennessy benefitted from being able to see the effectiveness of their omnichannel campaign at a granular level on both upper- and lower-funnel metrics, allowing L’Atelier and Assemblage teams to make in-flight optimisations to drive towards desired outcomes. The company was particularly happy with the strong brand uplift from the campaign.
“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 tim”
Gavin Merriman
Head of Consumer Engagement APAC, Moët Hennessy