In keeping with its brand promise to bring "sunshine to all," Dole launched a campaign in Q3 of 2020 picking up on the tensions of a challenging COVID-19 lockdown that saw parents working from home and children home-schooling.
In Q1 of 2021, Dole extended the success of this campaign to address the new "normal-ish" conditions. Both campaigns were built around real-life family tensions coming out of quarantine and semi lockdown conditions and showcased how Dole Fruit Bowls could bring much needed levity to these moments making it ok to show how consumers were truly feeling.
Objective:
2020 was a year of unexpected learnings and Dole Sunshine Company, a leading global player in packaged fruits and vegetables committed early on to supporting their consumers as they were forced to adapt and evolve.
In keeping with its brand promise to bring "sunshine to all," Dole launched a campaign in Q3 of 2020 picking up on the 'Quaran-tensions' of a challenging COVID-19 lockdown that saw parents working from home and children home-schooling too.
In Q1 of 2021, Dole extended the success of this campaign to address the new "normal-ish" conditions. Both campaigns were built around real-life family tensions coming out of quarantine and semi lockdown conditions and showcased how Dole Fruit Bowls could bring much needed levity to these moments making it ok to show how consumers were truly feeling.
When an advertising message is delivered to the right person, at the right time and at the right place: Its attention potential and emotional impact amplifies. This is where the context of a moment presents a far greater opportunity to reach consumers when they are most likely to connect and engage.
Dole's role is to always help brands and agencies design campaigns that translate these moments into real impact with its unique approaches across platforms. The company's AI-powered context detection platform Mirrors by Silverpush enables contextual ad placement across the biggest video advertising platform, YouTube.
Dole embraced Mirror's computer vision to detect in-video contexts and reach desired audiences at the moment they were actually engaging with content. Dole's mandate was clear: to help Dole transcend the limitations of basic keyword and demographic targeting on YouTube and to help propel personalization, not at a behavioral level but at a content level with the aim of achieving maximum ad effectiveness.
A benchmark of 70 percent was set for the campaign as the primary KPI.
Target Audience:
Dole Fruit Bowls has wide appeal and the core target market extended to everyone in the U.S. ages 18 and older with a focus on parents and nurturing adults, such as grandparents. With Mirrors' precise and nuanced video level targeting, Dole would reach this audience at desired contextually relevant moments.
In excess of 10,000 fresh YouTube videos were scanned to detect contextual categories that were aligned to the brand's campaign delivery around comedic and playful family moments: parents unintentionally being caught in the act of profanity by their kids, naughty/ bad words uttered by kids, trying to work/ gym at home with kids interrupting at the most inconvenient moments, etc. Dole also tapped into content on YouTube around tongue-in-cheek shows like Modern Family, Young Sheldon, and The Office whose viewership encompassed the desired audience sets.
Creative Strategy:
Connecting in the right context multiplies the impact of the message and enables navigating the pitfall of missing the individual behind a consumer category, demographic group or work profile.
Dole leveraged Mirrors powered contextual moments to reiterate the versatility of its Fruit Bowls, engaging highly curated pool of audience sets as opposed to following a blanket targeting approach that often leads to ad waste.
Creatively the strategy was deployed across the following context categories:
Context:
Humor is one of the most powerful creative weapons to create a strong emotional connection and together with contextual relevance a bigger opportunity for Dole existed to stand out and build preference.
In the spirit of adding fun to the quarantine-induced tensions of life in lockdown, Dole created the narratives around homelife stressors with biting humor but also equally important empathy and matched that to moments on YouTube that were relatable.
Ad recall in week one of the Q3 campaign "Quaran-tensions" would go on to yield 44 percent and by week four evolve to 54 percent. This would in turn spearhead the creative extension for FY21 Q1's "Normal-ish."
Overall Campaign Execution:
Dole served ads in-line with content prospective audience sets were actively engaging with on YouTube: a list of defined context triggers in relation to these context categories defined for each campaign were system trained pre campaign go live.
Mirrors employs AI to scan the video universe on YouTube and filter out videos that match these contexts. The campaign was then deployed on YouTube against these filtered videos (making brand safety and suitability so much more meaningful). Mirrors continuously scanned and supplied new videos to optimize the campaign. This eliminates the use of broad keywords/topic-based audience targeting.
Mirrors targets content that is being watched right now, not content that has previously been watched, making the contextual targeting most effective and in real-time.
Creative execution focused on playfully replacing "bad words" with Fr*it B*wls. In "Normal-ish" creative addressed "going back to work/gym/date nights and love language."
In one creative execution, entitled "Bad Words," a couple uses the term "fruit bowl" instead of swearing in front of their kids about the chaos they are causing. In another Quaran-Tension execution titled "Kid Code," a couple of moms are complaining about their bratty kids, again using the code-term "fruit bowls." The third execution, "Love Language," shows amorous grandparents who signal each other for private time by saying "fruit bowl." The spots close with the line: "Real fruit for real moments."
Building on the "Quaran-tensions" campaign, the phrase "Fruit Bowl" took on multiple meanings in the "Normal-ish" campaign, a nod of agreement, an expression of frustration and a code word for anything. Mom heads to "her office," dad to "the gym," and a couple to "date night" all within the "normal-ish" confines of a semi-quarantined life.
Mobile Execution:
Dole invested a budget of $171,999 for "Quaran-tensions" and a further $195,000 was invested for "Normal-ish." The budget was deployed against harnessing contextual moments on YouTube and extended across mobile, desktop, tablet and connected TV.
A combination of six-second bumper ads and a range of 18-to-25-second in-stream skippable video ads were utilized. Bumper ads boost reach driving campaign salience. Dole's video ads were placed mid-roll-on YouTube and supported with overlay and display banners.
Actions depicting the kids and profanity, prank playing on parents was one of our best performing contexts throughout the campaign, with an overall view-through rate (VTR) of 52 percent for skippable ads and an overall VTR of 91 percent for non-skippable ads. These videos accounted for 14 percent of the skippable ad's impressions and 17 percent of the overall non skippable ad impressions.
Contextual moments can have a vast array of associations that are not limited to the content but recon with underlying emotion the content elicits. The Dole campaign on Mirrors is testament that contextually relevant ads are less intrusive and more engaging, leading to a more positive brand recall and uplift in views. A brand lift study was run in tandem with ad serving and the results are supportive of this.
Mirrors served ads to the relevant audience sets in line with content they were engaging with, not based on past searches or affinities. The built-in brand safety mechanism coupled with campaign based contextual targeting, filtered undesired content that can potentially evoke negative emotions like drinking and nudity.
Alex Concepcion (Dole global senior manager in digital communication) said, "Parents responsibilities increased overnight. It was important for us to reach them in a way that was authentic, humorous, and memorable. There was a lot competing for their attention, making the right time and context key to breaking through.
The results in burst one for "Quaran-tensions" in Q3 delivered above the brand's benchmark of 70 percent for VTR and evolved from 72 percent to 81 percent in Q1 for "Normal-ish." In both bursts of the campaign, smart phones and connected TV delivered the most responsive audiences.
Ad recall in week one of the campaign for "Quaran-tensions" increased from 44 percent to 54 percent by week four and Dole saw a relative 7.4 percent uplift in purchase intent over this period. The call to action directed consumers to Dole's presence on Amazon.
Overall, the success of the campaign was the delivery of a seamless ad experience, and this is supported by the performance of the higher VTR against the prescribed benchmarks as well as the notable uplift in ad recall.
There is no doubt that the use of a large variety of contextual triggers and brand thematics allowed Dole to achieve scale beyond keyword and affinity targeting and presented a unique and innovative opportunity to reach receptive consumers.
Dole successfully landed a playful and 'tension releaser' positioning in a time overwhelmed by worry. Mirrors' contextual intelligence helped Dole significantly increase the relevance of its messaging and communications and as a result these messages were able to break through and achieve desired market impact.
