The age-old question for streaming TV advertisers is how to target the viewers they want while reaching the scale their businesses need.
The quick-serve restaurant operator CKE, which owns Carl’s Jr., Hardee’s and the Red Burrito and Green Burrito brands, initially dealt with the challenge of targeting and scale by consolidating marketing under one national account. The consolidation helped them gain efficiency from the greater total budget. That was the idea, at least.
But in the past couple of years the company has split back into a more regional focus, where specific restaurant chains are responsible for their own marketing in their own territories, said Scott Sutton, CKE’s director of media.
The regional focused is based on where each restaurant chain is clustered. Carl’s Jr. locations are mostly in the Western US, while more of Hardee’s locations are in the Midwest and on the East Coast.
What that means for CKE media buyers is that there is a greater focus on finding pockets of media or particular channels that can deliver scale, while also targeting within a state or market and layering in additional data. Sutton said this evolution in the marketing approach by the company led to a case study published on Monday between CKE, Amazon Ads and Attain, a marketing and retail data seller.
Streaming TV ads are very attractive, since the ad platforms can scour for particular audiences or households, Sutton said. But they aren’t so effective when limited to a state or market, he added, and many platforms don’t even enable that kind of targeting by state.
To convince franchisees to get on board with more streaming TV ads, CKE’s marketing org needed to prove that the buys pay off to local restaurants and chains. Buying ads during NFL games is an obvious strategy that moves the needle across the country, Sutton said. And Amazon’s Thursday Night Football broadcasts were part of the Amazon Ads test.
But one of the attractive opportunities, he said, was that people who’d seen an NFL commercial for a restaurant in their region could be retargeted by Amazon Ads elsewhere in placements that made more sense for a particular brand. The company has a NASCAR sponsorship, for instance, he said, which is very effective for brand-building for Carl’s Jr. in the southwest. Spots during soccer games work better for its East Coast chain, Hardee’s.
“We have a unique footprint with brands on the West Coast and East Coast, so for us to be able to buy an entire property and split it up just the way that we want really makes a difference,” Sutton said.
A national cable feed can be parsed and targeted to a degree, he added, “but it’s super expensive to break it up, and it’s really not worth it.”
The retail data seller Attain enters the equation as a reliable way to gauge an immediate local ROI on behalf of franchisees.
CKE has used location-based foot traffic data in the past, Sutton said. But foot traffic data is heavily modeled, he added, and in a total black box. Having tested providers, he said there can be important differences between providers, like if one relies too much on Android data and another misses Android entirely.
The company sought credit card data that indicates someone came into a restaurant and made an actual purchase. For this, the brand added Attain, which owns its own network of apps, including the shopping rewards app Merryfield, the cash advance app Klover and a rewards-for-receipts shopping app called Frisbee.
For CKE, the question isn’t just “Did this media or data work?”
Sutton said the focus has to be on whether the investment was worth it.
“You’re paying all these extra layers for your ad tech,” he said. “You’re paying for targeting, for contextualization, for premium this and premium that.”
And then there’s the measurement plan, which one pays for to see if everything panned out.
The question becomes, “Is it worth the incremental cost to do all this targeting that you can do?” Sutton posited. “And the answer is: Sometimes, but you’ve got to find those opportunities.”
