Data-Driven Marketing is not the buzz of tomorrow!
Receiving rewards and sometimes awards for your work is great! The past weeks were truly special, as our Nestlé Wagner Piccolinis campaign received the DPOK in the launch and the MAX Award in the Data-Driven Marketing category. How cool is that?!
But the quote from the MAX Award jury deeply touched me: “These guys do something, that others just talk about”, they said – and meant Data-Driven Marketing. Well, first that really sounded great and I immediately felt proud that my team delivered a breakthrough that not everybody can do today. Afterwards, I started to think about what Data-Driven Marketing really means and whether this is in fact new and innovative.
Well, I think it’s not!
Twenty years ago, when I started working in marketing, Data-Driven Marketing was already there, and it was not new. For all product and conceptional innovations, we dived into consumer understanding: by quantitative research to identify market trends and segments and qualitative research, spending days and weeks in focus groups and deep-dive interviews. These learnings we turned into insights, concepts, and campaign ideas and tested to qualify the best creative implementations. Of course, it was also important to define the most fitting media strategy to reach our audience when and where they were most receptive to our message. Was that different from what we are doing today? I don’t think it was.
The only differences I see are the media channels we use and the amount of data we have access to today vs. decades ago.
Our success story in Data-Driven Marketing
I believe everybody does Data-Driven Marketing. In the past, today, and we will do it in the future as well, as data is the foundation of marketing. Our Piccolinis campaign is a perfect example to showcase the process. As said, consumer data was the starting point. Through analysis and workshops, we identified distinctive audiences and relevant business opportunities that we turned into a motivating brief. And then the magic started! Our experienced creative team identified several compelling situations for the different audiences, where we could address our consumers with relevant messages. Early collaboration and ongoing alignments with our media partners ensured smooth execution, as even the best insight and creative implementation fail if you cannot target the right audience at the right moment with them. But in our case, everything worked out very well and all parties cooperated as one team to bring our data-driven Piccolinis campaign to success.
Finally, we created way beyond 200 different messages for different audiences and situations and published them via DCO (dynamic creative optimisation) on YouTube. We enabled the execution to travel across borders efficiently and played our campaign in three languages and four countries while only focusing on two crucial details: creating relevant messages to targetable audiences. All this was possible through a profound understanding of data combined with experience in a purpose-driven, data-supported creative process.
What’s next?
Seeing the great business results and the recognition of two awards for the campaign, we will, of course, continue. It seems obvious that a well-prepared and excellently executed DCO campaign drives success, so this is the way we will go further. We are already preparing our next campaign with Wagner, where we will again dive into data to identify the best insights and sweet spots for our communication. We will also drive a broader implementation through the capabilities of the DCO and go beyond YouTube. So stay tuned for further personalized pizza campaigns and success stories!
