Asda supercharged its TV ads with the power of CRM

Frequent, small basket shoppers moved to local stores during lockdown. It became business critical to get them to return. Our objective was to target these lapsed shoppers and use a platform powerful enough to entice them back.

The strategy

With time of the essence we needed a channel that could change opinion on a dime and that could only be TV. This left us with a conundrum – the only channel that’s impactful enough to change minds is a channel that can’t target users based on CRM records.

Keeping a steady eye on the market we had a revelation - Covid-19 has accelerated adoption of broadcast VOD services – could we use this to replicate our TV campaign? With a growth of 45% YOY, users are switching from linear TV to broadcast VOD in droves meaning that TV content starts to be truly targetable on an individual level at scale for the first time.

The campaign

We partnered with Channel 4 and InfoSum to pioneer a media first where Asda could share its CRM data with Channel 4 in a completely GDPR compliant and legally safe manner and use email address data to target lapsed shoppers on TV.

Using Asda’s advanced internal segmentation and insight tools we scoured the upcoming product offers to find anything that could be used to speak specifically to small basket shoppers.

We discovered that Halloween costumes drove disproportionately more sales to frequent shoppers than any other product. This insight armed us with a product that would resonate strongly with lapsed shoppers. So our campaign would run at Halloween promoting Halloween costumes to Asda parents in shows such as The Great British Bake Off which we know to be an Asda family favourite.

The results

We made TV targetable, on a one to one scale, for the first time ever. Thanks to the brand new collaboration on measurement we found that an incredible 9.35% of users that saw the ad were driven to purchase.

This resulted in an ROI 4.3 times higher than our benchmark TV ROI (which was already the highest ROI of any channel) making it the highest performing piece of activity, ever! But most importantly it saw a return of our departed shoppers to Asda stores with share of market completely restored by the end of 2020. That’s supercharged TV!

Asda were overjoyed with the campaign and commented that: “Finding new ways to engage our customers and build their relationship with the Asda brand is critical to our long-term success. Our work with InfoSum and All 4 gives us a path to future testing and undoubtedly, continued success. The merging of data with smart targeting capabilities will enable Asda to continually create relevance with our customers and forge even stronger relationships moving forward.”

This project was a winner at The Drum Awards for Marketing 2021. Find out which competitions in The Drum Awards are currently open and don’t forget to visit our new interactive calendar.