Background
Unilever Wall’s, a leading ice cream brand in Pakistan, is a dominant market leader with over 65% market share in the ice cream category. While the ice cream market appears saturated, the snacking industry has demonstrated exponential growth over the years. Snacking industry is valued at over €1.1B, posing a huge opportunity for Wall’s to flex its muscle in the snacking market and gain share, which is currently at 15% in the snacking universe. Out of biscuits and chips, biscuits are the more popular snacks with over 40% market share. Thus, Wall’s decided to penetrate this market by launching a product as a snack, an Ice Cream Sandwich, chocolate and vanilla flavored ice cream between two soft biscuits.
Challenge
The snacking market, comprising of over 150 snacking brands, is an extremely cluttered advertising universe and most brands struggle to gain and maintain market share. More so, this market posed two major challenges, perception and consumption to further penetrate in to the market.
Perception: To get consumers to perceive ice cream as a snack.
Consumption: To get snacking consumers to move away from regular snacks and consume Wall’s Sandwich instead.
Solution
Football, the world’s most played sport, had its flagship event FIFA World Cup in 2018, which gathers high traction and viewership year after year. Wall’s realized that sporting events bring people together and provides an opportunity for the consumption of snacks. Hence, it decided to utilize the FIFA World Cup 2018 platform to generate awareness and trigger consumption for Wall’s Ice Cream Sandwich. Utilizing sports sync in Mediaocean's platform, Wall’s synchronized Facebook ads to key moments throughout the tournament, including major teams crashing out, players scoring goals, and red cards to serve contextual relevancy for the consumers.
Results
The campaign proved to be successful, surpassing all industry benchmarks; assets delivered 2X engagement rate and 2.4X engagement in real time when compared to non-sync campaigns for the same assets. The Facebook page following increased by 16% during the duration of the campaign. Not only was the campaign digitally successful, but consumer and audience feedback was outstanding as well.
