Ocean Spray is assembling its cross-channel campaigns for the holiday season – and just producing and managing the video assets alone requires Santa’s Workshop-levels of effort and cross-team collaboration.
But fragmentation is both a challenge and opportunity, according to Melanie DiBiasio, the brand’s associate director of media and martech.
“We work with each of our different media plan partners to make sure that whatever we put out on each of those channels is bespoke and will work as well as it can on the channel,” she said.
And there are a lot of different partners on the plan.
For this year’s seasonal campaign, which highlights cranberry sauce as a must-have addition to family gatherings and holiday tables, Ocean Spray is partnering with Orchard Creative as its main agency with support from another agency called Stone and agency-style services teams from Pinterest, TikTok, Vox and Dotdash Meredith. Five social content creators are producing promotional spots specifically for TikTok.
And that’s just the content creation.
Media agency KWG is handling the buying, which includes two parallel campaigns. The first is via The Trade Desk using mostly third-party data for targeting on the open web (with Oracle as a partner for purchase data). A second media plan will run through the Walmart DSP built on The Trade Desk platform, which DiBiasio said Ocean Spray uses as a method for attributing overall campaign success.
Although Ocean Spray isn’t driving sales to Walmart exclusively, tracking whether a campaign helps lift sales at Walmart locations is a useful barometer for it’s also driving outcomes elsewhere.
On top of all that, Ocean Spray is testing a shoppable programmatic ad vendor called MikMak so it can include a click-to-cart button in its programmatic display and video ads. The button plugs into local grocery stores where Ocean Spray products are available.
Berry native
To get the most value out of media partnerships, the creative and the ad buy must be specific to the media.
That’s especially true of TikTok, where Ocean Spray has commissioned five creators to produce TikTok-native video content. Several of those accounts are recipe influencers who will share posts featuring Ocean Spray products, but Ocean Spray also signed two dance influencers. (The campaign features a cranberry sauce-esque “wiggle jiggle” dance move, DiBiasio said).
But content that feels authentic on TikTok and creators with an established presence on the platform can’t be ported elsewhere, she said. And the same is true for the videos Ocean Spray is producing for Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, which don’t necessarily translate to TikTok.
Part of the issue is practical. Videos shot in landscape mode would be laughed off any TikTok feed. But brands also need to consider a platform’s reason for being.
Pinterest, for example, is a useful channel, but only if you know how to use it, DiBiasio said. Ocean Spray gets value out of working directly with Pinterest’s brand services team and has what Pinterest calls a “Trend Badge” to promote its recipe content.
“It’s important to have the third-party credibility we’re getting from the platform with its users,” she said.
Put another way, rather than jamming its marketing on a platform, DiBiasio said, Ocean Spray allows each platform to guide the brand as to what works best on its home turf.
But some success you can’t plan for.
In 2020, Ocean Spray had what might still be the biggest brand break-out moment of TikTok’s history when a video of a skateboarder drinking juice went crazy viral and caused Ocean Spray to fly off the shelves at grocery stores.
These things can’t be forced or manufactured, DiBiasio said.
“Leaning in on creators has been important for us on TikTok after seeing how much power that can have,” she said. “Would we love to have another viral moment like that? Absolutely. Do we expect it? No.”
Juicy content
This year marks Ocean Spray’s third Q4 campaign working with Vox-owned Group Nine.
The brand is shooting a series of videos for Group Nine’s culture-focused site PopSugar that mix of humor with holiday-themed ideas, including cocktails recipes and tips for building a gingerbread.
Those videos will run across other Vox-owned sites, such as Thrillist and Punch, which feature food and recipes. Although the videos might eventually be syndicated to Facebook or YouTube, DiBiasio said, they were specifically produced to fit natively into Vox’s style and tone.
In addition to its longstanding partnership with Vox and the test with MikMak, Ocean Spray is launching its first campaign partnership with Dotdash Meredith this holiday season to create shoppable recipes and recipe videos.
Dotdash Meredith owns Food & Wine, Simply Recipes and Eating Well, among other titles.
Publisher partnerships, platform partnerships, influencer partnerships for content creation, shoppable tests, third-party data targeting, working with Walmart – it might sound like a lot, and it is. But fragmentation has become the name of the game for marketers today.
“And we’re not even doing CTV or non-linear TV,” she said. “Just online video.”
