The Drum Awards for Marketing - Extended Deadline

-d -h -min -sec

Cadbury Facebook Mondelez

"Brands need to realise if they are not going to invest in digital paid media then don't do it at all" states Mondelez European head of digital and social media

Author

By Stephen Lepitak, -

November 28, 2013 | 4 min read

"We have reached a point where brands need to realise that if they are not going to invest in paid media on any of their digital platforms that we recommend that they don't do it at all," Mondelez International's head of digital and social media, Sonia Carter, has stated.

Speaking at the final Empty 13 event about the recent Facebook marketing campaign developed for Cadbury's Creme Egg, Carter revealed that the success of the Facebook posts was due to paid for promotion rather than virality.

She poured scorn on those who saw social media as a cheap marketing route to grow sales, claiming that without investment, she would not have reached a large enough audience to shift enough units - and that having seen success from having done so, every Creme Egg Facebook post next year would be backed with media spend.

"Oreo opened the door for us to approach social content properly. They really showed that by putting as much effort into every social opportunity as we would into TV or print really was going to pay off. We've had a great start with every post being a story in itself,'" Carter said.

She explained that the decision to turn to Facebook came through the desire to reach the 16-24 year old audience following a two-year decline of Creme Egg sales, an audience that TV was not reaching.

"We just knew with that that TV just wasn't going to cut it. The audience are totally in control of how they share things and TV wasn't going to reach them - so our challenge was how do we use it [social media], particularly Facebook, and achieve genuine scale that would generate those sale figures."

Revealing that each post within the campaign of 75 posts received backing of "thousands of pounds" in media over a 12 week period, Carter presented results of a 15.2 million unique reach, 7.6 average frequency, and 4.63 million interactions driven by media. Meanwhile, the ultimate cost per engagement was found to be £0.08.

"The reason we got that was through paid media and that is a big wake up call to our industry. We can't rely on virality alone. If digital is really going to play the part that it should play, we have to realise that we need to put some media behind it to get the scale, otherwise I'm literally talking to five per cent of my audience, which is not enough.

"The amount of investment in resource is ridiculous for what you're getting back - the numbers just don't add up. So focus on a fewer number of platforms, and the ones that genuinely get you scale...Facebook has got scale for quite a lot of our markets and brands."

She went on to reveal that the strategy for next year would see every single post backed by media spend. "We should be confident that we are creating good enough content that you would want to put money behind every single piece.You wouldn't create a TV ad and think, 'we're not really sure.' You've got to be confident that you want millions of people to see it and that's the approach we are going to take for our brands - produce amazing content that you want millions of people to see that is worthy of the investment."

The case study behind the Mondelez campaign for Cadbury's Creme Egg demonstrates that the strategy quadrupled purchase intent over TV.

Cadbury Facebook Mondelez

More from Cadbury

View all

Trending

Industry insights

View all
Add your own content +