Brief:

• Nilla Wafers, the cookie brand marketed by Mondelez's Nabisco, announced results from last year's 50th anniversary campaign tied to the release of lemon-flavored wafers. The Facebook and Instagram campaign boosted ad recall by 32 points and reached 11.9 million users of the social networking apps from March 15-31, 2018, according to an Instagram case study shared with Mobile Marketer.
• Nilla Wafers served vertical video ads designed to be mobile-first on Instagram Stories to U.S. women ages 18 to 54. The video creative showed a box of Nilla Wafers straining to contain the new cookies and then exploding to send cookies and confetti flying across the screen.
• Each ad showed a "shop now" call-to-action button that was linked to the product website, where viewers could see more product information or make a purchase. Mondelez worked with social video ad platform VidMob to create the campaign.

Insight:

The Nilla Wafers campaign leveraged its existing creative in a vertical video format that's better suited for mobile viewing. "Instagram Stories assets elevated the media mix by captivating attention with full-screen vertical video," Jerry Bell, partnerships manager at Vidmob, said in the case study.

Vertical video is a must for mobile campaigns, given that many smartphone users are accustomed to swiping through social media feeds with a single hand. Fewer than 30% of mobile users turn their phones sideways to watch an ad, and those that do only watch about 14% of the ad content, according to a study by agency Media Brix. Facebook in September 2016 introduced vertical video ads, a format pioneered by rival image-messaging app Snapchat, to make its ad platform more effective with mobile viewers.

The kind of "shop now" call-to-action in the Nilla campaign will likely change in the wake of Instagram rolling out a closed beta of its Checkout feature. The new feature lets mobile users complete and track purchases without having to leave the app, and could make shopping via Instagram content and ads even more seamless for users.

As brands like Nilla Wafers need to continually innovate with fresh flavors and products to compete with emerging private-label brands, revamping digital marketing strategies is also essential in effectively reaching consumers. Mobile devices are transforming how people consume content, and marketers continue to explore how social can serve as a creative channel to engage target audiences with bite-sized interactive content on the platforms they're already on.

Meanwhile, Mondelez is working to adapt to changing tastes with the recent launch of its SnackFutures innovation platform. Last week, the company partnered with The Hatchery Chicago, a nonprofit food business incubator, to encourage entrepreneurship and cultivate new ideas for the snack industry. As rivals like Kraft Heinz have shown, brands that don't innovate in both products and marketing get left behind as consumer tastes for food and media change.