Beech-Nut – Media Partnership Made in Heaven
Reaching Parents with Baby Food for Thought
Challenge
THIRD EAR was tasked with developing a media strategy to effectively reach Beech-Nut’s revolving consumer target of new moms with babies ages 4-9 months. With challenges like babies quickly aging out of the supported product and a lack of an online sales marketplace yet slow category offline sales attribution, how could THIRD EAR help Beech-Nut leverage precise targeting and in-flight sales optimization to both reach parents and drive sales of its flagship product, Beech-Nut Naturals® Jars?
Action
THIRD EAR used a full funnel approach to reach Beech-Nut’s consumer at multiple touchpoints throughout their purchase journey, deploying media through a range of channels including programmatic, retailer partnerships, and sponsored product listings. Based on historic learnings, THIRD EAR redefined the Beech-Nut targeting strategy to focus on known baby food buyers identified through deterministic data, rather than relying on demographic or behavioral data to blanket moms. In partnership with highly reputable 3rd party offline purchase data providers such as NCSolutions, THIRD EAR developed baby food/product-purchaser segments on a strict 3-month lookback, requiring monthly audience data refreshes to continually meet parents in the brief window their households were in-market. This strategy allowed Beech-Nut to identify and programmatically target prospective buyers without reliance on online behavioral data (which can be often unreliable) or CRM data (which Beech-Nut didn’t have at notable scale due to audience turnover).
To further campaign impact, THIRD EAR partnered with NCSolutions, a leader in CPG offline sales attribution, to leverage their NextGen Sales Lift Metrics measurement solution (SLiM). A new-to-market capability, SLiM offered a major increase in visibility of in-flight sales impact. THIRD EAR relied heavily on this data throughout the campaign to evaluate channel performance and make optimization decisions, allowing Beech-Nut to allocate spend toward media that was ultimately driving sales.
Results
The result? Thanks to a full-funnel approach, a new targeting strategy, and in-flight optimization toward Beech-Nut’s true KPI, the campaign succeeded in both driving awareness with the target audience and paving the path for online purchases. The sales followed. Year-over-year programmatic media incremental Return on Ad Spend increased by an astonishing 280%.
While the results are incredibly encouraging, THIRD EAR and Beech-Nut never rest on laurels and will continue to learn, adapt, and optimize to further improve in future efforts.
