Healthy Choice Brand Integrated Content

We won business from Conagra Brand’s Healthy Choice for a second time.  This campaign was centered around these Brand Integrated Content pieces and included a small selection of sampling, couponing, and brand ambassador stations.

The biggest challenge with this project was the short turnaround time.  I wrote the scripts a day after the contract was signed, and within ten days, we had final legal approval.  I chose to put the shoot in a gym in the same building (The Merchandise Mart) as the client, so they could quickly attend.  I didn’t expect about a dozen people from the brand to participate.  We captured everything we needed and were right on schedule, even with the vast crowd.

Below are the finished content pieces.  The thirty-second spots will play on our gym-based overhead video network, and the fifteen-second areas will run on Cardio screens as pre-roll before a workout starts.

Results:  The campaign ran for a month starting on January 7th, 2019.  The coupon redemption rate was outstanding, which closed another deal in the summer of 2019, which included the third round of contracted Brand Integrated Content spots, which were shot in September of 2019, but had multiple ConAgra brands and not just Healthy Choice.

Marketing Master Deck

Near the end of the Summer is usually a slow period where I use this excess capacity to refine and improve our sales materials.  Two years ago, we assembled all of our sales materials into a titanic 300+ page Powerpoint that contained every potential sales scenario, and we called it the “Master Deck.”  Over the years, we found that storytelling using these materials wasn’t the best it could be.  Pages often contained overlapping content, which meant the story wasn’t as concise as possible.  I felt it was time to address this by rebuilding the entire thing from scratch.

I decided the best way to address this was to isolate each selling point into a list.  Then I worked with our Marketing Director and Content Writer to distill the essence of each of these into the most precise and concise story we could.

I then worked with my designers to finalize the product, which was deployed just in time for the significant influx of media spending at the end of the year. By mixing and matching these slides, it is easy to construct a compelling story that is precise, consistent, and beautiful.  This led to the largest quarter of business that Zoom Media ever experienced. Download the full document here and see some of the highlights below…

Influencer Campaign Extension

Our offerings reach over 26,000,000 gym members, which is a lot.  But compared to other forms of media our reach is pretty small.  I came up with the idea of extending an in-gym campaign by supplementing the reach with well-known fitness influencers making sponsored posts on social media.  Fitness influencers are very popular, because that kind of information and inspiration comes from a personal voice.  It is very powerful when a product is endorsed by someone who has this personal connection with their consumer.

Not only is it an attractive add-on to help close a deal, but the images, brand engagement, and positive feedback on the posts generate are great additions to a post-campaign report that they can take to their boss and proudly say they ran a successful campaign with Zoom Media.

To do these activations, we partnering with a couple different influencer platforms, IZEA and CreatorIQ.  Both of them allow you to connect with a large audience of Influencers, communicate, approve, and activate sponsored posts for the brand.  These services allows us to manage posting from dozens of Content Creators without a huge demand on your staff.

Pictured is our sampling campaign with Unilever where their three deodorant brands (Axe, Secret, and Degree) offered their new deodorant wipes in our health club partners.  They sponsored 10 influencers in this campaign which extended their campaign reach by 1,300,000 people and 29,000 engagements for no cost to them (and a fairly small cost for us).  They were delighted with the results and loved the pictures and brand engagement that we shared with them.  Not only are we hoping to renew with their deodorant brands in 2020, but we’re hoping to extend to many other CPG brands under their corporate umbrella.

Fourth Quarter
Engagement Strategy

Most brand and agency media spending happens in Q4.  My team created this postcard for each salesperson to hand address and send to 50 of their best clients to remind them of who we are and why our media delivers results that they are looking for.

In this creative, I chose a few of our greatest selling points that differentiate us with from other media offerings.  We combined those stats with simple punchy text and clean illustration to make the creative that you see below.  I felt that adding a silver foil feature on the front to help get noticed in the client’s mailbox.  It cost about $700 more for this feature, but I felt it was an excellent investment for the postcards to be noticed.

All in the effort cost about $1,500 for printing and postage.  Most of the hard work was put in by the salespeople who had to hand address every card, though I feel it would be this attention to detail that would get these postcards seen.

It is often hard to really measure results of these kind of efforts as it was a drive to contact each of our salespersons directly, but a few of them forwarded notes on how brands really liked this tactic, including one of our key clients Lexus.

Programmatic Lift Strategy

More and more brands have been buying media programmatically instead of through our sales team.  Zoom Media was projecting to more than double our sales through this channel in 2019.  Much of our backend focus in the last couple years has been hooking up our ad inventory to the major DSPs.  I was tasked to create the media selling strategy to increase awareness of our digital integration and how you easy it is to activate your media buys in health clubs. 

We started with the term “Digital Engaged” and started building the PPT as the base because it would have the most copy and establish the tone for the entire campaign.  Next I worked on a video that could be linked to in a client email that you can see below.  I then built a landing page that told a concise easy story about our audience and why you should buy us digitally.

Once the assets were built we targeted two media buys that would engage our target audience.  We spent a little under $20k through sponsorships of newsletters and display ads in major Media publications.  The campaign ran in October 2018.  The display ads did really well and bested benchmarks by 60% on CTR. Our client outreach has broken through with a couple of Digital Buying teams.  As the campaign seemed to only bring in modest gains in the second quarter of 2019 as we were expecting to see some lift, the third quarter has been extremely strong programmatically.