Starbucks and Arla Foods optimise creative in a Starbucks Doubleshot^® Espresso campaign

As the licensed partner of Starbucks, Arla Foods manufactures, distributes, and markets its milk-based ready-to-drink coffee, so they are always looking for ways to extend their reach and increase product awareness with consumers. Most recently, Starbucks and Arla Foods wanted to kickstart a CTV brand campaign to boost ad recall of Starbucks Doubleshot® Espresso. Their ultimate business aim was to drive purchases of the chilled coffee beverage across supermarkets and convenience stories in the UK.

Starbucks and Arla Foods turned to Quantcast to help them reach their core audience in CTV environments. With Quantcast’s first-party data and advanced machine-learning models, they could maximize audience reach, and with Quantcast’s premium advertising-based video on demand (AVOD) supply, they could partner directly with premium publishers to serve high-impact CTV ads, while measuring brand lift across this audience. To evaluate the effectiveness of their campaign in real time, Starbucks and Arla Foods leveraged Brand Lift Live by Quantcast^TM, asking the question: “Do you recall seeing a Doubleshot ad?” Upon learning that it was not driving ad recall, they were able to deep dive into the campaign, midway through it, to find out why.

Adjusting the questioning, they determined that the creative was driving awareness of Starbucks®’ chilled coffee drinks but not Starbucks Doubleshot® Espresso specifically, and used this insight to optimize a follow-up campaign with Quantcast. The learnings from the Q4 campaign not only helped Starbucks and Arla to understand how their campaign was performing in real time, it also fueled creative learnings for their next campaign. In their second campaign using online video ads, they made sure that the creative focused on one product only: their plant-based offering with clear product messaging. This time, the Brand Lift Live results reported a 17% lift in ad recall, which was almost a 20% improvement.