Catalina Crunch started off in 2017 as a purely direct-to-consumer (DTC) brand advertising ketogenic (“keto”) snack products on search and social, including Facebook and Instagram.
But, as product demand and Facebook CPMs concurrently rose, a DTC-only biz wasn’t enough to scale the business, said CEO Krishna Kaliannan.
The company’s brand awareness is relatively low compared with the rest of the consumer-packaged goods vertical, he added.
So, Catalina Crunch launched its first national television campaign this month to make up what it’s been lacking in reach. The ad is also running on connected TV.
Prior to this campaign, which began this month, “we haven’t invested so much money in awareness before,” Kaliannan said.
TV advertising, both linear and CTV, is uncharted territory for Catalina Crunch, which is why the brand also started investing more in the creative format this year.
Still, while the brand’s latest video spot is an awareness campaign, Kaliannan said the brand is also trying to convert that awareness into sales. Branding alone isn’t enough to guarantee a purchase.
“You can’t pay employees with awareness,” Kaliannan said.
Digital-first
Over the summer, Catalina Crunch started its TV exploration with a CTV campaign first. Because CTV can target ads against specific households at scale with digital-like granularity, the medium gave the keto brand many different data points to play with and analyze.
Meanwhile, Catalina Crunch’s previously favorite channels, namely Facebook, became more expensive and less data-rich. CTV suddenly looked more alluring both from a price and data perspective.
Google and Facebook have “automated away audience targeting,” Kaliannan said, which made those buys harder for Catalina Crunch to justify because it was receiving less impression data back from campaign reporting. “We had very little understanding of who we were targeting,” he said.
Apple’s AppTrackingTransparency framework “certainly threw a wrench in things,” Kaliannan added.
Because CTV gives buyers more control over audience targeting than online walled gardens, Catalina Crunch considers streaming “almost like old online advertising,” he said.
Tell it on TV
Catalina Crunch uses purchase data to compare the impact of its CTV campaigns with previous online-only campaigns.
The brand has yearslong integrations with retailers, including Walmart, Target and Kroger, for example. It can tell which and how many of its products it’s sold from brick-and-mortar stores based on week-by-week breakouts of point-of-sale data.
Kaliannan said Catalina Crunch was able to generate higher success rates on CTV converting audiences who were already familiar with the brand compared with other channels.
The problem is, well, not that many people are familiar with Catalina Crunch in the first place, Kaliannan added.
The brand decided to try to find segments of people who were already familiar with Catalina Crunch on linear TV.
Using purchase data, it segmented audiences by purchase intent. Then it looked at audience data generated by CTV ads to ascertain what types of linear programs lower-funnel audiences are likely to be watching and make its media plan for linear.
Even though Catalina Crunch is prioritizing branding over performance marketing, sales are the brand’s “primary metric” for measuring the success of its first linear campaign.
Other metrics of TV ad measurement, such as optimal reach and frequency, are still an “open question” for Catalina Crunch, Kaliannan said, because the brand has only been marketing on CTV for a few months.
Face it
But TV advertising isn’t as simple as taking a digital creative and slapping it onto a bigger screen.
Catalina Crunch works with New York-based video creative agency SuperHeroes to create longer-from video ads for TV.
SuperHeroes worked with behavioral data-based consultancy System1 to A/B test viewers’ emotional responses to different versions of Catalina Crunch’s TV commercial ahead of launch.
Survey participants rank how a certain ad makes them feel based on seven different facial expressions, including “neutrality,” Jon Evans, chief customer officer of System1, told AdExchanger.
Surveys suggested that the first versions of Catalina Crunch’s ad elicited a more negative response (specifically fear) on average because the seagull featured in the ad was originally too close to a person. To avoid scaring away keto lovers, the seagull is further away from humans in the final version of the ad.
Getting the tone right mattered, Kaliannan said, because TV creates the type of emotional resonance that Catalina Crunch is banking on to build a long-lasting brand awareness.
