Dive Brief:

• Hasbro was able to grow affinity and attract new buyers to its Peppa Pig and Play-Doh products through ads on Amazon Prime Video, according to a case study published by the e-commerce giant.  
• The toy and entertainment marketer was an early adopter of Prime Video ads, which began rolling out earlier this year, running campaigns aimed at parents for Peppa Pig and Play-Doh in the U.K. and U.S., respectively. Creative on the streaming service was tied to searches and purchases on Amazon’s e-commerce marketplace.
• Hasbro saw a 21% lift in branded searches and an 18% increase in sales for Peppa Pig while Play-Doh received a 14% bump in ad recall and 4% boost to brand favorability. In both cases, the brands were able to engage a large set of entirely new customers.

Dive Insight:

Case studies like Hasbro’s are valuable to Amazon as it pitches brands on allocating more resources to Prime Video. Introducing commercials to the streaming service is a key piece of Amazon’s goal of realizing a full-funnel advertising platform, where brand-building and awareness-led tactics like TV campaigns can be linked closely to online sales, lessening the need to spend on other channels. Amazon’s troves of first-party shopper data, or retail media data, are positioned as adding an additional layer of precision to these campaigns. 

Amazon’s booming ad segment still derives the lion’s share of its revenue from formats like sponsored product ads that surface as people browse around the company’s expansive e-commerce marketplace. But the rollout of commercials to Prime Video in January — a change that has stirred consternation among users accustomed to an ad-free experience — showed Amazon placing a bigger bet on upper-funnel marketing capabilities. Hasbro’s early adoption of Prime Video ads indicate that brands are finding success making fuller use of Amazon’s tool set.

A Peppa Pig campaign in the U.K. that ran from February to March tested three different creative messages to gauge which would result in higher conversions, relying on Amazon’s first-party data to target households with young parents through a selection of brand-safe programming. The effort reached 7 million unique viewers and over two-thirds (68%) of purchases for Peppa Pig in the six-week campaign window were from shoppers new to the brand. 

Third-party analysis from Lucid verified improvements in Peppa Pig’s ad recall, brand awareness, purchase intent and brand favorability. Hasbro executives also praised how Amazon’s low advertising volume — the company has promised a lighter ad load than rival streamers — helped create a “relatively uncluttered space.”

“Prime Video drove largely unduplicated reach and brought new consumers into the purchase journey allowing our lower-funnel efforts to be more efficient,” said Jennifer Burch, senior director of global media at Hasbro, in a statement attached to the case study.

Positive results for Peppa Pig encouraged Hasbro to port its strategy over to the U.S. for Play-Doh. The children’s modeling putty engaged 7.2 million unique shoppers via Prime Video, a majority of whom were not reached by display advertisements that appeared as part of the same campaign. Seventy-nine percent of Play-Doh sales attributed to the Prime Video push were from new customers. Consumers who saw a combination of video, display and sponsored ads demonstrated a 6.4% higher purchase rate than those only exposed to sponsored placements.