Mondelez says Facebook ads generate sweeter ROI than TV

The initiative, dubbed “Storytelling at Scale”, aims to help the company’s marketers reach potential customers who are not yet fans of their brand pages through a mix of curated content and paid-media.  

It sees the business move from serving what are effectively banner adverts as a way to reward its advocates to a model where it uses organic and paid media to increase the circulation of branded content.

The shift follows the successful trial of the strategy earlier this year around Crème Egg’s “Have a Fling” campaign when it invested “four to five times’ more than it ever had done on the brand’s Facebook activity in the UK.  The increased spend allowed the brand to treat daily posts as a “mini above-the-line” execution that a had a more consistent tone of voice with the main campaign than previous efforts. The posts with the best feedback along with the most popular user-generated content were then boosted to 18 to 25-year-old Facebook users en masse through paid media such as Promoted Posts. Additionally, some activity was ramped up around key TV events such as Britain’s Got Talent.

The strategy increased brand consideration on TV by around 20 per cent over three months, according to the snacks maker while 18 per cent was attributed to Facebook. It also led to a  7 per cent increase in single Creme Egg sales over the same period. Kantar Panel research was further able to demonstrate not only a link between Facebook and direct sales, but that the combination of Facebook and TV drove 66 per cent more sales than the sum of the two parts would suggest.

Jerry Daykin, European social media manager at Mondelez, says: “We launched the trial to find a new approach to our media mix that was going to reach 18 to 24 year-olds. We used a Facebook process called the Publishing Garage where we got all our agencies together to establish our content pillars.

“It’s not that what we were doing before wasn’t delivering results. Facebook doesn’t just have to be a deep engagement platform for an audience it can be something that broadcasts an engaging marketing message en masse.”

Mondelez will implement the model across all the pan-European marketing strategies for its brands in the coming months.

Sonia Carter head of European digital marketing and social media at Mondelez, told Marketing Week the approach was a “gamechanger” in the way it proves the effectiveness of social media to be a mass marketing channel and drive sales,

She adds: “We wanted to make sure that rather than trying to get across the entire campaign message in every single post, we were creating a rhythm throughout the course of the campaign. At the same time, we were looking at crossmedia efficiencies – so making TV perform better, but also making it work harder for Facebook.

“It’s not just about knocking out a banner [advert]. For us now, it’s about treating our posts as potentially having the same reach as a TV ad. We should start seeing increased investment in paid media in Facebook to drive reach. But we’re also hoping to apply this model across the whole social space as the model we have applies to other channels.

Facebook has repeatedly warned in the past that scale on its platform will not come for free and marketers face increasing difficulty breaking through the clutter to audiences. Mondelez’s social media revamp is the latest attempt from the company to do so following its high-profile strategic deals with Google and Twitter.