With an AR campaign to Ad Awareness Champion: Danone uses Untapped Potential on Snapchat

Reaching New Target Groups

In the competitive food industry, it's crucial for established brands like Danone to strengthen their brand awareness, reach new affluent target groups, and highlight the value of their products. Facing this challenge, Danone and its media agency Wavemaker ventured into new waters and initiated three campaigns on Snapchat for its brands Alpro, Volvic, and Actimel - with considerable results. Unlike traditional social media platforms, Snapchat is used daily by around 15 million active users in Germany to share complete and imperfect moments with close friends and family. The ideal environment for Danone to reach a younger target group (18-34 years).

A Testing Approach Across Brands

Danone wanted to test Snapchat as a platform for one campaign first in order to be able to apply learnings for the following campaign. That was the perfect way to understand which formats and ad creatives they should use to reach their goals. The first campaign aimed to strengthen the brand awareness of Alpro's plant-based milk substitute products, especially among users aged 18 and over. Alpro was to be established as a regular part of the breakfast routine. For this, six individual breakfast ideas including recipes were developed and played out to the community in the form of Snap Ads and three commercials. Danone followed up on this initial success with its Actimel brand. As part of the existing "Actimel Power" campaign, the food manufacturer again set ambitious goals specifically for addressing the younger target group (18 to 34-year-olds). The successful formats Snap Ad and Commercials were expanded by the Story Ad format, and more creative diversity was added. For this, specifically developed visual material was created to land even better with the young target group. Driven by the success of the Actimel campaign, Danone and Wavemaker decided to implement a third campaign for the target group of 18 to 34-year-olds. For the first time, Snapchat's Augmented Reality technology was to be used. The scope of this campaign was larger compared to Alpro and Volvic. Danone decided to use the popular AR technology among Snapchatters and thus trigger a hype around the recipe for a new Volvic summer drink - the Pink Drink. In addition to a Story Ad and a video commercial, Danone and Snapchat designed a creative AR Lens that playfully introduced Snapchatters to the recipe and the right composition of the drink. As another lever for this campaign, various creators like Naomi or Muhi drew attention to the Lens and thus to Volvic and its new summer drink on their platforms.

Amazing Results Through Implemented Learnings 

All three campaigns achieved amazing results. By applying the learnings, these results could be optimized across different brands. Alpro: In addition to over 18 million impressions in a campaign period of just two weeks, Danone also achieved an increase in Ad Awareness of seven percentage points¹. Snapchat has proven to be a success. Since the commercial with €0.03 cost per view was particularly effective, one of the learnings was to definitely keep the format in the next campaign¹. For Actimel, however, additional video formats were added, so that a multi-video approach was used. With a 2.7 million total reach and an Ad Awareness of Actimel by eight percentage points, as well as a Message Awareness of +8ppt, this campaign was also a success. The commercial was particularly successful with a remarkable view-through rate of 70 percent and a Message Awareness of +11ppt².

For Volvic, the mix was further expanded to include an AR Lens. The AR Lens had a reach of 2 million Snapchatters after a run of two weeks, and recorded over 30 million impressions with a playtime of over 11 seconds. In total, the campaign reached 8 million users³. With the activation on Snapchat and the use of AR, Danone achieved an increase in Ad Awareness of 17 percentage points and a fantastic Action Intent of +9ppt³.

Janina Bryant, Senior Media Strategy Manager at Danone, says: "Especially the combination of different formats and the use of AR technology have achieved impressive results for us. The next Lens for Actimel is already planned for October."