Client Results

Digital Ad Testing

Serving Up a New Recipe for Advertising Effectiveness

In response to sluggish sales growth, a popular quick service restaurant (QSR) chain turned to expanding its menu. The client needed to understand which brand perceptions drove the share of visitation, and then optimize its marketing campaign to reinforce these perceptions while supporting its new product launch. To this end, the restaurant needed to know what to measure, how to measure it in an unbiased way, and then how to optimize the campaign to deliver its message.

Optimizing the dynamics between advertising, brand perceptions, and customer behavior to promote a new product.

LRW executed a two-phase program including a phase 1 focus on message strategy that addressed both brand and campaign goals, and a phase 2 to evaluate and optimize the campaign mid-flight.

During phase 1, we captured perceptions of the restaurant and its competitors at system 1 (automatic, fast and often unconscious way of thinking) and system 2 (effortful, slow and controlled way of thinking) levels. Our Marketing and Data Science (MaDS) team identified the key driver of visits to their restaurants using Bayesian Network Modeling, addressing both rational and more emotional consumer need states. This insight informed development of the campaign creative to ensure drivers of restaurant visits could be incorporated with messaging about the new product.

In phase 2 we tagged digital ads associated with the product launch campaign, allowing us to understand campaign exposure and even exposure to specific elements of the campaign. Our PACE Analysis allowed us to understand the performance of the campaign across platforms, assets and channels, while controlling for exposures to determine which aspects of the campaign provided the greatest lifts across KPIs. With this knowledge, the client was able to tune the campaign by dropping some creative assets and reallocating spend to the most productive assets, channels and platforms, ultimately maximizing short-term impact while reinforcing long-term equities.

Key takeaways:

  • New menu item needed to battle two fronts simultaneously: improve perceptions of key brand driver and to overcome poor perceptions of food quality.
  • Pivot positioning of new menu item away from a standalone product and more toward a delicious ingredient.
  • Focus media spend on active-engagement channels (such as online ordering and delivery apps) and dynamic visual advertising (online video).
revenue growth 2

Rockin’ Revenues

Sales increased 8.6% in following quarter

digital boom

Digital Boom

Digital sales increased 48.3% in the following quarter

more marketing muscles

More Marketing Muscle

Launched largest ad campaign ever to critical and analyst acclaim

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