How Kellogg’s Is Taking a Commerce-Driven Approach to Marketing

As a U.S. institution that houses some of the world’s most recognizable brands, there is practically an expectation that a consumer-packaged-goods company on the scale of Kellogg’s will buy commercial time during events as iconic as the Super Bowl.

Typically, this is where marketers attempt to achieve a cultural impact with creative executions, but it’s rare for brands to use such expensive commercial air time to try something completely experimental.

For Super Bowl LIII, Kellogg’s repeated its “flavor stacking” creative theme from last year’s Super Bowl with its Pringles brand. Although, this year, the CPG’s CMO for North America, Gail Horwood, chose a more experimental approach, using its commercial time to run what participants are calling a media first for connected TV adverts during the Big Game.

The company served audiences watching the L.A. Rams lose to the New England Patriots via the CBS app on Apple TV an on-screen call-to-action, encouraging viewers to interact with the creative.

This included serving users a personalized version of the ad. One execution asked audiences to scan a QR code, which would take them through to an ecommerce environment where they could buy the item. Another version was personalized depending on the city the viewer was watching the 30-second spot in—the name of the city was overlaid on the creative—with a Pringles chip-flavor combination further displayed to encourage more interaction.

Kellogg’s interactive Pringles ad involved working with Innovid, which specializes in the complexities of video ad tech, to deploy the capabilities necessary to ensure the campaign could be tailored to better resonate with specific audiences.

Early results suggest that 6.4 percent of all households exposed to the ad campaign engaged with its personalized creative, according to Innovid.

Additionally, Innovid asserted that versions of the ad which included a QR code in the creative high led to 0.6 percent of those exposed subsequently visiting the Amazon Pringles storefront.

“We had the opportunity to do something that had never been done before,” Horwood told Adweek. “So, we were really able to experiment with two types of creative and connect the dots for the consumer to shop the ad while they were consuming the content from our Pringles creative.”

Horwood went on to note how audiences that stream live sports content as well as gaming are a key demographic for the Pringles brand and that linking upper funnel activations with actual purchases was key to how the CPG wanted to engage those audiences.

Tal Chalozin, CTO of Innovid, explained the measures necessary to ensure such an experimental approach would not fail in such a high-profile environment, adding that this was the first time a Super Bowl ad had been commerce-enabled.

Chalozin explained that the interactive nature of the campaign’s creative meant his team had to be on call to support 4,224 unique creatives delivered as part of the execution, as the ad was personalized dependent on geography.

“The ability to overlay interactive content over ads is not a new idea but to do it over a live sports event and one with this much scale is something that is truly unique,” Chalozin said.

Horwood said that performing experiments at events on the scale of the Super Bowl help provide proof of concept.

“This is really about making the creative work harder for the brand and seeing how we can make it more frictionless, and it’s promising for the future,” she said. “Certainly, we’ve now got metrics that we never had before, and we can use those to try and come up with a virtuous loop [to connect ad buys with sales] and then start to think about our creative in different ways.”

Ronan Shields

@ronan_shields

Ronan Shields is a reporter for Adweek, focusing on ad-tech.