turning a nation’s cheers toward every athlete.

Brand Context

Cadbury Dairy Milk Bites is CDM’s version of new format innovation.

Situation Context

With shifting snacking habits, bite-sized treats have been on the rise in the chocolate category itself. Competition like Hershey's and M&M's too have ramped up media investments, resulting in their bite-sized offerings gaining traction.

To tackle this and maintain their market leader position in the country, Cadbury Dairy Milk forayed into the segment with CDM Bites.

The Challenge

Curate an effective AYR media strategy to build and grow the segment for CDM Bites - as a handful joy bag perfect for sharing and savouring anytime.

The Insight

Target consumers of CDM Bites would have high consideration for the category, and as such would have overlap with consumers of select (chocolate and non-chocolate, both) brands within the Mondelez portfolio.

The Strategy

Mondelez had embarked on First-Party Data collection journey since 2021 which were routinely tested to gauge their effieciency vs broad targeting to larger brand TG. Basis the T&L results, the observation was that digital metrics of owned audience had improved with higher CTRs and VTRs vs deployment to wider TG.

Leveraging the above learnings for carving a new segment with a premium product launch, a pivot to a smarter strategy was called-for: hyper-targeting our own audience for deeper engagement and amplified results.

The Execution

Volumetric exercise determined the absolute audience size required to reach to achieve business targets at a market-level, and a T&L approach was employed:

  • Key geographies were divided into two sets with similar population mix for multi-cell Brand Lift Study.

  • Leveraging pure data-driven audience intelligence, the cells targeted platform-specific demographics in one market-set and First-party owned-audiences in another market-set, hence swapping mass blast with hyper-focused targeting between the cells.

  • Success of the T&L hinged on the hypotheses that the cell with owned-audiences forward digital deployement

    • would drive sales growth faster than the cell with platform audience

    • uplift in brand metrics would be higher vs cell with platform audience

In a platform first, during launch, we partnered with Meta to deploy 2 seperate BLS in both market-sets to gauge any brand metrics uplift.

The Results

The idea was to scale the owned audience approach to all the markets basis the results from the T&L. Which we did! 25% higher sales growth was observed in the markets with focus on first-party audiences.

Additionally, we had positive uplift for brand metrics, while no movement were observed for open audiences market set. This success not only inspired the client to test a unique strategy for a new launch but also laid the groundwork for a paradigm shift in future marketing.