In the past year, while the number of wine drinkers in the U.S. grew by 14 percent, overall wine consumption decreased by two percent. With more competition and shifting consumer purchase behavior in the premium wine category, Cupcake Vineyards set a goal to drive sales and capture brand share by reaching and engaging new customers while staying top of mind with existing customers.
Objective
Cupcake Vineyards partnered with AdTheorent to achieve its objectives through a digital advertising campaign to promote its "Summer of Joy" brand marketing initiative. The brand sought to drive sales by encouraging customers to enter the Summer of Joy sweepstakes by including a scannable QR code under the cap of a Cupcake Vineyards wine bottle that led to an immersive Augmented Reality (AR) experience where consumers could explore Summer of Joy sweepstakes weekly trip prize offerings and enter for a chance to win daily travel prizes, weekly destination trips, and a grand prize of $50,000.
By leveraging AdTheorent's machine learning-powered advertising and predictive audience solutions, Cupcake Vineyards was able to ensure the campaign reached the consumers most likely to purchase a bottle of wine and engage with the brand's "Summer of Joy" landing page."
Context
For the 2023 campaign, its second year, Cupcake Vineyards was looking to build upon the momentum generated from the previous year and focus on finding new ways to unlock growth in 2023.
In 2022, the "Summer of Joy" digital advertising campaign relied solely on third-party audience segments to drive engagement with the sweepstakes landing page and sales lift. In 2023, Cupcake Vineyards chose to reach the target audience and drive campaign performance using AdTheorent's new algorithm-based, ID-independent audience solution to ensure ads were not only served only to consumers in the Cupcake Vineyards specified target audience, but only to those within that audience that were most likely to take the campaign's desired action, increasing efficiency and driving performance.
Creative and Media Strategy
AdTheorent leveraged customizable and primary-sourced data sets to create an ID-independent predictive "wine enthusiast" audience that mimicked Cupcake Vineyards target audience profile. The AdTheorent custom audiences drove stronger performance compared to third-party audience segments across all tactics:
In terms of broader campaign performance, Cupcake Vineyards and AdTheorent drove higher sweepstakes engagement metrics compared to 2022 metrics:
Cupcake Vineyards' primary audience profiles included:
• Cupcake Vineyards: Joy seeking millennials between the ages of 25 to 39 with a female skew
• Signature Sweets: Sweet-seeking gen Z and millennials between the ages of 21 to 34
• Lighthearted: Health seeking gen X consumers looking for healthier alcohol options
Cupcake Vineyards also identified two key cohorts that would help the brand gain market share in the premium wine category: Hispanic and LGBTQ+ consumers between the ages of 21 to 34.
The Cupcake Vineyards media and creative strategies aligned to engage the brand's target audience across multiple touchpoints and seamlessly nurture potential consumers from awareness to conversion. Rich media provided an interactive experience that encouraged user engagement and incorporated short-form video to further capture user attention. Connected TV (CTV) effectively used storytelling to educate viewers of the Summer of Joy offerings and utilized a QR code to drive conversion. Cross-device display leveraged behavior based targeting and strong CTAs to reach qualified users with high intent of purchase.
To reach and engage new customers, AdTheorent executed a full-funnel digital advertising strategy via a mix of custom rich media, video, connected TV, YouTube, and cross-device display tactics. AdTheorent also leveraged its algorithm-based audience targeting solution to create custom audience models designed to reach consumers within Cupcake Vineyards' specific geographic and demographic parameters who were most likely to purchase Cupcake Vineyard wines.
To demonstrate the impact that the AdTheorent campaign had on Cupcake Vineyard sales, AdTheorent ran a digital sales lift study using Catalina, which integrates within retailer point-of-sale systems to collect real-time UPC-level purchase data tied to frequent shopper cards to quantify advertising with in-store sales. The sales lift study proved the AdTheorent campaign was successful in driving increased household penetration and incremental sales lift compared to the control markets.
Cupcake Vineyards relied on AdTheorent's advanced machine learning technology and privacy-forward solutions to achieve the "Summer of Joy" campaign objectives. AdTheorent took a comprehensive, three-pronged approach to the campaign's targeting strategy:
First, AdTheorent created an ID-independent predictive audience by leveraging customizable and primary-sourced data to create a statistical representation of the Cupcake Vineyards desired audience. From there, AdTheorent's predictive audience models evaluated more than 1,000 privacy compliant data signals to score programmatic inventory based on the likelihood of reaching consumers within the brand's target audience that were most likely to purchase Cupcake Vineyards wine, only bidding on impressions with a high predictive score. AdTheorent also used contextual signals around wine and culinary publisher visitation and contextual browsing behavior to further inform targeting.
Second, AdTheorent leveraged custom purchase-based third-party data segments to increase exposure among buyers of premium wine, healthier alcohol options, and competitor brands. Further, AdTheorent implemented dynamic point-of-interest based targeting to consumers within a specific radius of select Cupcake Vineyards wine retailers.
By leveraging AdTheorent's machine learning technology for precise audience targeting, Cupcake Vineyards was able to achieve superior audience quality, campaign reach and KPI performance.
However, Cupcake Vineyards faced significant challenges due to premiumization trends in the wine industry. Consumer behavior was shifting, with 72 percent of volume losses attributed to consumers trading up to super premium and sparkling wines. Additionally, fewer stores were displaying premium wine brands and those that did had fewer weeks on floor. AdTheorent was able to help the brand address these challenges with a digital advertising campaign that utilized advanced machine learning technology reach the target consumers most likely to purchase Cupcake Vineyards wine and visit the "Summer of Joy" sweepstakes website.
The results of the Catalina sales lift study proved that audience exposure to AdTheorent's digital advertising campaign had a positive impact on incremental Cupcake Vineyard wine sales. The campaign successfully reached qualified consumers and drove 125,000 unique buyers, resulting in $473,463 in incremental sales and an 18 percent sales lift over the control group, outperforming the average alcohol category sales lift benchmark by 84 percent.
The campaign was also effective driving new customer acquisition; of the 125,000 buyers the campaign reached, 49 percent were new Cupcake Vineyards customers and moreover, 8.3 percent of these new customers made multiple purchases of Cupcake Vineyards products throughout the duration of the campaign.
Implementing a full-funnel digital strategy proved to be an efficient and effective way to drive campaign performance. AdTheorent conducted a media overlap impact analysis that observed a significant improvement in the rate of conversion for consumers who were exposed to both rich media or video and display ad formats as compared to those exposed to only one of those ad formats alone. Compared to consumers exposed to only rich media, video or display ads, the consumers that were exposed to both rich media and display ads, or video and display ads, converted at a 132.47 percent and 154.51 percent higher rate, respectively.
The Catalina sales lift study demonstrated a 37.3 percent household penetration lift, indicating that the campaign was successful in identifying, reaching, and driving purchases of Cupcake Vineyards wines. Further, the 18 percent sales lift highlights how AdTheorent's advanced predictive audience targeting, and machine learning technology was effective at reaching new consumers most likely to purchase Cupcake Vineyards as well as driving the overall spend and frequency of purchases among existing consumers.
