brand awareness

Boosting brand awareness and favourability using tailored Facebook video ads

South Africa’s leading hot chocolate brand boosted ad recall by 33% by using Facebook video ads that were specifically tailored and targeted by age and demographic.

The plan 

Nestlé is aSwiss multinational food and drinks processing conglomerate corporation headquartered in Vevey, Vaud, Switzerland. With hot chocolate striking a particular chord with Sound Africarenowned for its creamy, silky texture, appealing colour and rich taste.

Creating more relevant ads 

Nestlé wanted to test whether ad creative that was tailored to different audiences would drive better results than broadly targeted ads in terms of ad recall, message association and favourability. By getting personal with there audience Nestlé worked alongside mediaagency MetaMedia, digital agency ARC Worldwide and Facebook Creative Shop, Nestlé Hot Chocolate created two campaigns—one with broad targeting and one with demographic targeting.
The broad campaign used to reach and frequency buying to reach South Africans between the ages of 18–44. The demographic campaign was divided into three segments: men between the ages of 18–34, women between the ages of 18–34, and men and women between the ages of 35–44. The campaign used automatic placements to generate optimum results at the lowest average cost.
The next step was creating short videos targeted at each audience, with tailored messaging and themes aimed at men, women and couples. All the content had an overarching theme: that people should make time for the things they love and celebrate with hot chocolate. Following Facebook’s best practices for video, each ad introduced the product immediately and clearly by showing an image of the product and a person sipping Nestlé Hot Chocolate.
The video targeted to women featured a female lead along with this caption: “When you’re juggling a busy schedule, a jam-packed social life, and quality family time, Nestlé Hot Chocolate is always a delicious way to make time.” The video targeted to men featured a male lead, but the caption read: “When smashing the 9–5, getting in the gym workouts and having a jol with your buddies gets a little hectic, make time with Nestlé Hot Chocolate.”

Warming results

Nestlé’s experiment proved that ad creative tailored to specific target groups drove significantly better results than broad targeting. Between June 3–30, 2019, these ads achieved:

• 6-point lift in message association


• 2-point lift in favourability


• 33% lift in ad recall

This blog was originally from Facebook, to learn more about Nestlé's success check out their website and give their hot chocolate a try.

Generating brand awareness with help from Facebook video ads.
The iconic scotch whisky Macallan decided to develop a made-for-mobile video campaign throughFacebook’s MobileWorks program, successfully raising awareness with new American audiences and lifted ad recall by 13 points.
Macallan notorious for its widely admired single malt was founded in 1824, it has a reputation built on its outstanding quality whiskey and distinctive taste.In 2018, the brand unveiled its new £140 million distillery and visitor experience on its Scottish Speyside estate. The goal of this brand was simple. Generate brand awareness with new audiences. As part of “Make The Call”, its first-ever global communications campaign, The Macallan wanted to increase brand awareness and establish itself as a desirable choice for discerning young whisky drinkers in the US.

Measuring a phased approach with Brand Lift

Macallan worked with digital agency Zenith Worldwide to develop a two-phase Facebook and Instagram campaign that built on the “Make The Call” campaign film to drive up brand awareness in target markets. The campaign used Facebook Brand Lift to measure the impact of different ad buying strategies and creative approaches to help identify the best strategies for the future.
Phase one, which ran for a total of six weeks in late 2018, The Macallan and Zenith Worldwide tested a hypothesis that using a combination of the brand awareness and video view objectives would be the most effective way of driving incremental brand lift on a large scale, compared to optimising for video views alone. They used a multi-cell brand lift study to compare these approaches side-by-side in campaigns based on video ads and Instant Experiences with video creative adapted from the “Make The Call” film by The Macallan’s in-house team.
The team used interest and demographic targeting for the ads, as well as Custom Audiences based on page and video views and lookalike audiences, to reach its intended growth audience of younger, affluent, brand-savvy whisky drinkers in the US. Reach and frequency buying ensured reliable reach at a predictable cost.
Phase two, which ran for five weeks in early 2019, The Macallan ran a second multi-cell brand lift study, this time comparing near-identical campaigns in terms of optimisation, targeting and buying, but this time using made-for-mobile creative for the video ads and Instant Experience. This meant that The Macallan and Zenith Worldwide could then accurately assess any lift in brand awareness from made-for-mobile video assets.

Applying mobile-first strategies to video

For the second phase of the campaign, The Macallan worked with Facebook Marketing Partner Vidsy through the Facebook MobileWorks programme to develop video ad creative that was specially adapted for the mobile environment, so that it could compare results to the in-house creative used in phase one.
Taking the original “Make The Call” hero video, Vidsy produced several made-for-mobile edits of the video, using proven best practices and formats like vertical video to maximise impact in Stories, Instagram feed and Facebook mobile News Feed.

Gaining recognition

The Macallan’s two-phase campaign ran from November–December 2018 and from February–March 2019. The ad assets created through Facebook’s MobileWorks programme helped it reach a huge audience and boost ad recall, resulting in:

• More than 19 million people reached in USA


• 13-point lift in ad recall with MobileWorks creative


• 56% increase in ad recall with MobileWorks creative