Challenge

Crunch time.

Whisps was the new low-carb snack on the block. Made with just one ingredient — cheese. Crispy, tasty, and astonishingly low in carbs. With the Super Bowl just weeks away, we needed to make an impression in the cluttered snack category and get on the table in time for the big game. Tick tock.

Approach

“Mom guilt” meets its match.

People love snacking on crunchy things. The problem is, crunchy stuff typically has carbs. And our target audience, women and moms 25-54 who care about nutrition and over-index on snacking, tends to avoid carbs. So we positioned Whisps as a one-carb, one ingredient, totally guilt-free snack. Whisps are so guilt-free, our audience will just have to find something else to feel guilty about.

We owned the after-party.

Using audience search data, our media team saw big spikes in “diet” related searches in the days after the Super Bowl, the Grammy Awards and the Oscars — some of the biggest binge eating days of the year. From a media perspective, these guilt-filled days presented the perfect opportunity to serve up our zero-guilt message to huge audiences, and to do it for pennies on the dollar. When the time was right, we released a flood of funny, relatable social content designed to spike brand awareness, prompt sharing, and drive them to buy and try Whisps.

Smart media strategies made the sale.

We used a custom Private Market Place (PMP) and programmatic video to reach our audience on lifestyle and celebrity gossip sites like BuzzFeed, Mashable, and Bravo, where we knew they’d be the day after our tentpole events. We also retargeted those who engaged with our ads with messaging that reiterated RTBs. Ads were geo-targeted within three miles of store locations.

Results

Destination: Crunch

Our national 6-week campaign sustained an average increase of 2 units per store per week, an 18% increase in total sales — or 3-to-1 ROI on media spend.