Case study: Heineken launches Cruzcampo in UK

Beer giant Heineken has delivered a step change in audience targeting and industry measurement, demonstrating an uplift in brand awareness and incremental sales and driving positive ad recall for its Cruzcampo brand launch

The Challenge

As The Heineken Company looked to launch Cruzcampo in the UK, it needed to strengthen brand awareness, boost market penetration, and increase consumer consideration for Cruzcampo as a newcomer beer brand in the UK.

The CPG industry faces increasing media campaign challenges from fragmentation and disparate data sources to transparency and measurement. As audience attention diminishes and consumer privacy concerns rise, Heineken was looking for a highly effective campaign that could understand the true intent of consumers and the overall contextual environment in a brand-safe and privacy-focused way, without the use of cookies or people-based identity solutions. 

The partnership between Nano Interactive, leader in ID-free targeting solutions, and Circana, leading advisor on consumer behaviour, has helped Heineken combine Nano’s identity-free Intent Personas with Circana ProScores™ sophisticated modelling techniques to open up new opportunities to reach and engage with audiences in a targeted, privacy-friendly way.

“This partnership came at a really crucial time for the industry, which is grappling with cookie-free alternatives to target and measure audiences effectively,” said Matthew Beck, VP Strategy & Partnerships, Nano Interactive. “We have a unique position in market to lead the charge in helping the industry navigate these challenges. Our ID-free Intent Personas combined with Circana ProScores™ data, have proven to not only drive incremental sales and a significant ROI, but also uplifts across key brand metrics – this has already been game changing for leading brands like Cruzcampo.”

The Solution

To launch Cruzcampo into the UK market, Heineken worked with Nano and Circana on an initial pilot to test the effectiveness of the campaign, measuring brand uplift, market penetration, incremental sales, point of purchase and consumer consideration.

“The partnership enables Nano to tap into our ProScores data, combining it with Nano’s unique audience intent insights and ID-free targeting to allow advertisers to build targeted categories so they can reach shoppers with a higher propensity to buy,” stated Gordon Eldrett, UK Media Director, Circana.

The campaign combined Nano’s identity-free Intent Personas and Circana ProScores data with sophisticated modelling techniques to allow areas of opportunity to be identified in a privacy-friendly way. The resulting solution enabled Nano to bring real-time consumer journey data, deep contextual analysis and machine learning technology to the Cruzcampo campaign without relying on identifiers.

The Results

Nano and Circana utilised in-store shopper sales data to measure brand uplift, helping to optimise campaign spend against product distribution and measure the impact on in-store sales. The campaign illustrated a positive impact on brand awareness, driving incremental sales and resulting in strong ROI above the set benchmark by 43%.

Nano used ProScores insights to inform planning based on sales propensity at a Geo level with distribution, market share and category trends. This data was then layered onto Nano’s ‘food and drink’ vertical insights category plus its intent persona segment for ‘alcohol drinker’ in order to optimise delivery to areas in the UK with qualified sales opportunities for the Cruzcampo brand. Using this granular level of insights planning, the campaign saw uplifts across core brand metrics including a further 48% increase in positive sentiment for those who recalled the ad, with nearly all of those who recalled the ad having a positive opinion.

Dan Glynn, Programmatic Lead at The Heineken Company commented, “We’re really pleased with the ad campaign results we have seen from our partnership with Nano and Circana. This was our first pilot with Nano using its ID-free intent targeting solution. The results have been amazing, especially considering that the Cruzcampo brand is in its first year in the UK market.

While the main aim of the campaign was to deliver awareness, we also wanted a solution that could measure performance and short-term sales impact to understand the impact of programmatic advertising. By using combined intent personas and point-of-sale data, we’ve been able to measure ROI without relying on cookies, IDs or other people-based tracking methods. This has been an important takeaway for future campaigns across the Heineken brand and is definitely something we are now keen to build into our advertising strategies going forward.”

The ROI achieved in this campaign, which exceeded the set benchmark, is a critical marker, showing profitability for media investment in the brand overall. The pilot with Cruzcampo illustrates the potential for partnerships like this to yield bigger campaign results with a true measurement on brand impact.