Lean Cuisine, DiGiorno deliver ROI over benchmarks with Twitter ad campaigns

Brief:

Frozen meal brand Lean Cuisine had a $5.70 return-on-investment (ROI) after running its #ItAll campaign on Twitter and frozen pizza brand DiGiorno had a $4.95 ROI with a campaign that used Twitter's Periscope service. The results of the Nestlé brand campaigns were announced by Chris Padgett, Nestlé’s vice president of marketing and head of digital, during a session at Advertising Week.
For both Lean Cuisine and DiGiorno, Twitter provided the highest ROI across social channels. Padgett said that Nestlé typically looks for at least a 3:1 ROI from its campaigns.
Padgett said that Nestlé previously "got caught up on hyper-targeting on other platforms" where the cost-per-impression (CPM) was too high to achieve a high ROI. He also said that Nestlé plans to make its advertising "five times more personal" in the coming year.

Insight:

The ROI that Nestlé saw with the Lean Cuisine and DiGiorno campaigns demonstrates the value of engaging consumers when and where they are already having brand conversations, a key application of Twitter. While platforms like Facebook might pur brands in front of a larger audience, recent research shows that Facebook's ROI has been declining due to rising ad costs and consumer uncertainty following the Cambridge Analytica scandal. This trend could give a boost to smaller social platforms like Twitter and Snapchat, whose ad sales have been under pressure because of competition in the marketplace.

Lean Cuisine’s #ItAll social experiment asked women to define what "having it all" meant to them. The campaign turned survey results about life priorities — family, career, finances, wellness and more — into a pop-up "shop" that offered these priorities on the shelf. Video of the shopping experience was used as short-form and long-form ads on Twitter. Although the campaign caused some controversy, Padgett said that Lean Cuisine was able to incorporate customer feedback.

As part of DiGiorno's #DiGiornoNotDelivery campaign, the brand ran a livestream on Twitter's Periscope that pitted DiGiorno’s cook time against a generic delivery time. The campaign generated 9 million views and over 100,000 hearts, according to marketing firm Telescope. DiGiorno has over 123,000 Twitter followers and it regularly engages them with a similarly playful tone.

For Twitter, the results demonstrate that the platform is still an effective place for advertisers, despite seeing its global user base increase by just 2.7% to 335 million in Q2 2018 from a year earlier. Its U.S. user base was little changed at 68 million, but the company managed to sell more advertising.