Beyond media silos: PepsiCo proves full-funnel retail activation with Dollar General boosts conversion rates
The results proved that a full-funnel marketing strategy helped improve campaign performance and cost efficiency rather than running separate brand and retail sales campaigns.
“Working with The Trade Desk enabled us to try something we had never done before — merge our brand and retail sales campaigns seamlessly into a full-funnel, omnichannel campaign. The Trade Desk’s measurement solutions also enabled us to accurately measure the impact of this strategy. Overall, we achieved a significant boost in performance and efficiency that we hope to replicate in future campaigns.”
Tatsuya Sakai
Senior Director, Shopper Marketing, PepsiCo
THE CHALLENGE
BREAK DOWN MEDIA-BUYING SILOS TO HELP IMPROVE CAMPAIGN PERFORMANCE
PepsiCo is a leading snack food and beverage company in the United States and around the world. Its portfolio of popular brands includes Pepsi, Mountain Dew, Lay’s, Gatorade, Quaker, and Cheetos.
The company had previously executed media buying for its upper- and lower-funnel marketing strategies separately. However, they wanted to explore if taking an omnichannel approach would help improve the performance and efficiency of its brand and retail sales campaigns.
The company teamed up with The Trade Desk and retail partner Dollar General to implement a test campaign in the United States, to better understand the potential benefits of adopting a full-funnel, omnichannel strategy.
THE SOLUTION
REACH CONSUMERS AT EVERY STAGE OF THE MARKETING FUNNEL WITH OMNICHANNEL TARGETING
PepsiCo’s strategy involved using The Trade Desk’s demand-side platform to run a campaign, featuring a #BetterWithPepsi program showcasing “pizza is better with Pepsi” messaging and creative. The lower-funnel message featured a “buy 1, get 1 free” Dollar General coupon for a combo of Pepsi-Trademarked products and a popular brand of pizza, that targeted potential customers at every stage of their purchasing journey. This included tapping into The Trade Desk’s marketplace of premium online video and display inventory, utilizing AI-powered optimization tool KOA, utilizing transparent reporting for manual optimizations, taking advantage of holistic frequency controls across the entire funnel, and leveraging TTD’s Player Event Retargeting feature to help create cohesion between upper- and lower-funnel tactics.
PepsiCo used its CDNA first-party data and Dollar General’s syndicated retail audience data to reach its target audience via premium online video, exposing consumers to brand-focused messaging. Dollar General’s data was also used to reach more consumers via display and premium online video channels, exposing them to an ad designed to drive them to the Dollar General website to redeem a coupon. Users exposed to the brand-focused messaging were also retargeted with the sales-focused ad.
PepsiCo adopted Dollar General’s closed-loop measurement solution, along with The Trade Desk’s omnichannel reporting capabilities, to optimize and track the performance of its full-funnel strategy during and after the campaign.
THE RESULTS
HIGHER CONVERSION RATE AMONG OMNICHANNEL EXPOSURE VALIDATES A FULL-FUNNEL APPROACH
Using Dollar General’s closed-loop measurement and reporting in The Trade Desk, PepsiCo found that households exposed to upper- and lower-funnel ads had a 69% higher conversion rate – defined as a purchase of a PepsiCo product – than households exposed to only upper- or lower-funnel ads.
PepsiCo also experienced a 283% higher return on ad spend (ROAS) for its upper-funnel ads and a 208% higher ROAS for its lower-funnel ads after mid-campaign optimizations were implemented.
Despite the premium cost of retail data, the Dollar General deterministic audiences drove a strong ROAS of $7.68, far outweighing the costs of non-working media.
The results proved that using a full-funnel, omnichannel approach coupled with retail data and measurement can help drive better performance and cost-efficiency than running separate brand and retail sales campaigns. PepsiCo plans to adopt this approach for future campaigns, including those with other retail partners.
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