Kraft knows that consumers are easily distracted. At Forrester’s Forum for Marketing Leaders, Bob Rupczynski, VP of media, data and CRM at Kraft Foods, outlined Kraft’s strategy for leveraging the CPG company’s vast customer data through a data management platform (DMP) and programmatic advertising.
“Through our meals, recipes and videos, we have about a billion interactions with consumers every year,” Rupczynski said. “And we asked ourselves, how can we take advantage of all our data?”
Kraft turned to the media agency Starcom and DMP provider Turn, to help it gain and leverage insights from its customer data. In addition to having a comprehensive view of its customers, the company’s goals included delivering more relevant messages, optimizing its media buying decisions in real-time and attributing sales to impressions at the store level.
Using Turn’s DMP offering, Starcom combined Kraft’s 22,000 first-party data attributes, such as information about websites customers visited, email addresses and purchase behavior, and matched it with third-party data sources.
“Turn allowed us to centralize, store and connect data in ways that we haven’t been able to before,” said Lindsay Leon-Atkins, VP of integrated insights at Starcom.
Kraft’s partnership with Turn started six months ago and about 20 brands, such as Crystal Light and Planters are using Turn’s DMP and demand-side platform (DSP) solution.
Leon-Atkins pointed to Crystal Light’s “mass-micro personalization” campaign. The drink mix-maker is running a campaign against 24 targets built on first and third party data and working with a creative partner to assemble creative that is tailored to each consumer when the ad is delivered.
“Crystal Light might know that someone is interested in losing weight because they’ve been looking at weight loss or health tips on our sites and we can serve up an ad that talks about calories,” Leon-Atkins said. “ But through the third-party data we also know that consumer reads fashion blogs and is interested in fashion, so we could talk about 0 calories and a ‘pop of color’ that plays to the consumer’s interest.”
The campaign is still live, and early results show that it has led to a 17% increase in purchase intent, Leon-Atkins said.
Turn also enables Starcom to optimize and bid on ads in real time. Turn, for example, lets Starcom track the viewability rates of Kraft’s ads and as well as the average viewability of specific domains and placements before deciding whether or not to bid on an impression.
In addition, Planters is using first and third-party data to target ads at “heavy “category users,” (i.e. people who buy peanut products) who are “light Planters users,” said Leon-Atkins. “As a result, Planters was able to drive twice the ROI of all the other sites in terms of media plans,” he said.
Looking ahead, Kraft’s goal is to expand its programmatic strategy, Rupczynski said. “Programmatic is a centerpiece for us from a digital perspective … it’s about how we buy our media moving forward.”
As for whether it is ideal to use a DSP and DMP solution from the same vendor, it is “too early to say” Rupczynski told AdExchanger. “We’re still testing different platforms and there might be a situation where you want a more specialized platform, like a mobile DSP,” he noted.
