Background

UM South Africa is the South African division of Universal McCann Worldwide - the strategic media planning and buying arm of IPG Mediabrands. UM is a global leader in campaign planning, media investment and custom content creation. One of UM South Africa’s clients is Johnson & Johnson South Africa. Founded in 1886, Johnson & Johnson is the largest and most broadly based healthcare company in the world. Among its well known consumer products are the Benylin and Sinutab lines of cold and flu remedies.

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Challenge

Due to the Covid pandemic, Benylin and Sinutab decided to cancel their core winter campaign due to the sensitivity of the messaging. As a result, sales were significantly down in comparison to previous years. To capitalize on the last few weeks of winter the brands needed a rapid and innovative media activation, which targeted the right audiences on a digital media budget that was down by 81%. Internal trends data analysis revealed that changes in weather conditions prompted increased Google searches for cough and cold remedies which translated into sales.

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Objective

The main media KPI on Social was to reach 60% of the target audience while on Programmatic Display it was to reach 25% of the target audience due to the high frequency required to cut through on display.

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Strategy & Execution

3 weather signals (Rain, Cold Temperature and Wind) were used to trigger 18 unique weather related creatives across key South Africa cities, namely, Cape Town, Johannesburg, and Durban. By platform there were 9 unique creatives across Social and Display, with each creative linked to a specific weather trigger across the 3 key cites. The engaged audiences were then retargeted across social and display with product benefit ads to drive further consideration and traffic to store.

Results

The weather precision campaign performed exceptionally well by meeting and, in some instances, surpassing all its planned media KPI’s.

• The campaign drove record growth of sales across the brands and market share improved by +2 points versus the previous year.

• On Social there was a 476% higher CTR than 2019 winter campaign, which was achieved on 55% less budget. Engagement rate was almost double that of the previous year with 4.65% in 2020 versus 2.79% in 2019. An additional +2M impressions were delivered above the planned target. There was also a 61% increase in video views.

• On Display CPM was 46% lower, and 50% more users were reached vs the planned targets.

"The client was extremely pleased with the overall results of the innovative digital execution, which helped them turn things around by the end of winter, after a difficult start to their key season because of covid-19 and the unprecedented digital media budget cuts."

- Yinhla, Media Strategist, UM South Africa

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