Although Tasty, BuzzFeed’s popular food property, commands a ton of reach, it wants advertisers to know that it’s also a performance play.
BuzzFeed is making a concerted effort to prove the efficacy of its media, particularly on high-traffic properties like Tasty.
“We didn’t set out to build a shopper marketing offering, but because of our scaled distribution, it turned out that a lot of people were making recipes, not just watching our videos for entertainment,” said Ashley McCollum, GM of Tasty, who previously led partnerships at BuzzFeed.
“We’d always been bucketed in top-of-the-funnel or mid-funnel, but we were driving people into stores and weren’t capturing any of that value,” she added. “We weren’t positioned that way, and we weren’t building ad products that way.”
About six months ago, Tasty began attracting more inbound from brands and agencies with shopper marketing budgets like 3M Scotch-Brite, which is the first advertiser to test a new integration between BuzzFeed and mobile couponing app Ibotta.
Beginning this month, Scotch-Brite will turn branded content into a conversion opportunity on BuzzFeed’s Tasty as well as on branded Tasty and Nifty (BuzzFeed’s site for life hacks and DIY tips) videos in the Facebook feed.
The brand is embedding a deep link to a QR code for the user to download a rebate for sponges they purchase in-store.
Scotch-Brite is targeting users based on whether they’ve viewed its videos in the past to reengage them, in addition to using BuzzFeed and Ibotta’s integration to serve videos with unique calls to action.
“We’ll be sending different offers to brand loyalists vs. those who are new to the brand or who buy from our competitors, to help increase the buy rate,” said Pam Stephens, who works on digital media integrations for 3M Scotch-Brite’s in-house media team. “There was always this strong endemic linkage between our products and their content to fit in natively and authentically, but this integration touches all points in the funnel where our audience is.”
BuzzFeed’s data suggests that 67% of Tasty’s audience not only viewed a video but also took an action to create a recipe, like visiting a grocery store to buy ingredients.
“We did a ton of research with Datalogix and Facebook that showed when people viewed our branded content on Tasty, there was more than a $2 return on ad spend when measuring in-store purchases,” McCollum added.
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BuzzFeed’s McCollum said brands like Scotch-Brite are beginning to merge big, upper-funnel media campaigns at the national level with in-store shopper promotions, which were previously siloed operations.
BuzzFeed, which catered to brand advertisers, sees an opportunity to capture more shopper marketing budgets and bridge the gap between media and in-store by launching its own Tasty-branded kitchen cookware at Walmart.
“Brand marketers traditionally handled the top-of-the-funnel and shopper marketers handled the bottle of the funnel, but what has become very clear to me since CPG went through this massive transition in 2017 is that [branding] is no longer a luxury,” she said. “They have to be able to prove that big, top-of-funnel media has impact on the bottom line.”
