When Cadbury’s Tasmanian factory celebrated a century of making chocolate, Mondelēz turned to news media to help spread the message. VP of Marketing ANZ Paul Chatfield explains why it was the right fit for the brand.
For the past 100 years, Mondelēz brand Cadbury has been making its famous chocolate at the Claremont factory in Tasmania. The first factory established by the brand outside of the UK, over the years, generations of Tasmanian families have worked there creating a rich history and connection.
As the 100th anniversary approached, Paul Chatfield, VP Marketing ANZ, Mondelēz International, and his team saw it as a golden opportunity to celebrate the brand’s Australian history. Rather than selling chocolate bars, this would be an exercise in brand building 100 years in the making.
Chatfield said: “We looked at how we craft these messages in this campaign. We're in a place where we have been looking inward for authentic storytelling opportunities.”
To bring these messages to life, Mondelēz partnered with Nine developing an integrated campaign that rolled out across editorial as well as video content and traditional advertising placements in print and digital news environments.
Two factors guided the decision to partner with news for the campaign: reach and context.
Chatfield said: “News gives us the ability to reach 19 million Australians a week and it also gives us the opportunity to operate in contextual environments and a multitude of those. So, bringing those two factors together, it's a pretty powerful ally for us in impacting the market.
“We will always be guided by our objectives. Where there's an important aspect that news can play with, we will absolutely do that.
“What's really important for us as an advertiser is brand safety.
“It's about the depth of engagement that we can get. It's about trusted sources.”
Bolstering earned media
The partnership led to additional earned media coverage in a vast range of media titles from consumer to B2B.
“In a paid, owned and earned world, there's absolutely a role that news plays within that, in terms of how we can integrate content, how we can co-create content. There's a heck of a lot that we can do there,” said Chatfield.
For Mondelēz, working within the news environment allowed the brand to tease out a range of angles around the 100th anniversary that tapped into the human-interest stories. This served to elicit emotional responses such as calling on the nostalgia for many Australians who had visited the Cadbury factory over the years, a key aspect of the brand-building campaign.
Measuring the success of news
To measure the success of the partnership, and indeed all of the campaigns Mondelēz runs, the business relies on ROI modelling.
Chatfield said: “We've been doing ROI modelling for a very long time.”
Mondelēz works with Nielsen to measure short and long-term ROI.
“There are often these somewhat binary discussions about whether ROI is useful or not, good or bad. Of course, it's useful. It plays a really important role,” he said.
Chatfield says ROI modelling helps him to determine if the business is buying effectively and efficiently.
“It's about saying, is the ROI working? Are we headed in the right direction?” he said.
By adding news to the media mix, Mondelēz is seeing an increase in long-term ROI.
He advises marketers to experiment, to keep “pushing and learning”. He said: “Make sure you're tracking your equity. Is this actually shifting the needle?”
The news renaissance
Chatfield believes news is currently experiencing a renaissance.
“It's a little bit of a renaissance, within the paid, owned and earned model. I very much consider the role media channels plays and can continue to play in that regard,” he said.
To find out more about how news can help build your brand, download this report here.
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