Brief:

• Häagen-Dazs almost doubled its U.K. orders from Amazon Prime Now, the e-commerce company's two-hour delivery service, by sponsoring a weekly home-entertainment series that was promoted with an influencer campaign, according to a case study that influencer marketing agency Takumi shared with Mobile Marketer. The ice cream brand, which is marketed in the U.S. by a joint venture between Nestlé and PAI Partners called Froneri, worked with immersive storytelling company Secret Cinema on the eight-week "Secret Sofa" series.
• Häagen-Dazs' buzz score jumped fourfold among women, while its consideration score hit a two-year high with targeted influencer activity that coincided with a three-week TV campaign for the series. "Secret Sofa" received 80,000 new subscribers from the influencer campaign, whose content saw three times more engagement than industry benchmarks on photo-sharing app Instagram.
• More than 450 influencer assets created during the eight-week period generated 3 million content views and 450,000 actions including more than 60,000 on Instagram Stories alone. The influencer effort also saw engagement rates of 19% on TikTok and 4.2% on Instagram.

Insight:

Häagen-Dazs' positive results from its collaboration with Secret Cinema indicate that its influencer campaign was successful in driving interest for the "Secret Sofa" series of streamed movies. The eight-week home-entertainment series also shows how companies are adapting their marketing amid disruptions by the coronavirus pandemic. Secret Cinema typically produces immersive events inspired by classic movies, giving ticketholders a chance to participate in the story by dressing in costume and showing up at a previously undisclosed location that's decorated as a movie set. Live actors reenact the movie and urge attendees to interact with characters.

@matthewandryanuk

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Because of pandemic lockdowns, Secret Cinema developed the "Secret Sofa" series to stream movies to homebound audiences every Friday night. People who signed up for the screenings at the Secret Cinema website were invited to participate in a Facebook group before and after the movie to share user-generated content, including pictures of themselves in costume or videos showing choreographed dances. Each week, Häagen-Dazs paired an ice cream flavor with the selected movie and offered suggestions on how to craft specialty cocktails with ice cream, per a blog post. The brand provided discount codes for Amazon home delivery and gave customers a chance to win a week's supply of free ice cream, helping to drive a sales jump.

By working with social influencers, Häagen-Dazs and Secret Cinema were able to extend the campaign's reach among a wider audience of participants in the interactive virtual event. The home-entertainment series showed the effectiveness of influencer marketing on social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook and newcomer TikTok. Instagram is used in 90% of influencer campaigns, compared with 40% for Facebook, per a survey by CreatorIQ and Influencer Marketing Hub that didn't include TikTok. However, TikTok has grown more popular as an influencer marketing platform, as seen in recent influencer-powered campaigns by E.l.f. Cosmetics and GT's Kombucha, DSW and Hanes.