Mondelēz International and Carat Asia Pacific leverage joint facebook venture to expand business in key growth markets

Mondelēz has released results from the first stage in its Growth Markets Accelerator Programme, a joint initiative between themselves, Carat Asia Pacific and Facebook allowing their brands to reach millions of new consumers by applying their ‘Storytelling at Scale’ principles across feature phone devices.

Announced in March 2014, Mondelēz Facebook partnership has covered activity in 52 countries across dozens of campaigns from brands including Oreo, Cadbury, Milka & Trident. The Growth Markets Accelerator Programme ensures that the added value they receive from the partnership is disproportionally invested in key emerging markets across Asia, South America & MEA – driving creative excellence and media innovation, and using the Facebook platform to reach millions of consumers, in some cases for the very first time.

The just revealed Cadbury Dairy Milk Facebook campaign reached over 36 million consumers on their phones (the majority of which are not smart phones) across The Philippines and Indonesia and demonstrated that such a campaign can drive brand metrics and purchase intent. The move comes as Facebook is increasing its own focus on these emerging markets though its Internet.org initiative and launch of a new Facebook Lite app.

In the Philippines, consumers spend a whopping 4.3 hours a day] on social platforms making it the joint highest in the world (alongside Argentina). Jakarta, Indonesia is the ‘Twitter capital of the world'[2] and Facebook registered around 10 million new accounts in Indonesia in 2014. According to Facebook’s own data over 100 million users log into Facebook from these two markets every month, representing 90% of the total online population.

Despite this smart phone penetration still only stands at 15% in The Philippines and 23% in Indonesia, with Feature Phones far more common place across both. In fact 70% of mobile Facebook usage coming from basic feature phones. Recognising the untapped potential of feature phones, Mondelēz International and Carat worked together to run a test campaign that could provide learnings for the emerging markets across the global Mondelēz community.

A Facebook ‘Spark’ session was held in Manila attended by MDLZ, Facebook, Carat and Dentsu Mobius to create a ‘feature phones first’ campaign under the #joytime creative platform. The workshop took the creative limitations of basic mobiles (low resolution screens, limited data access and no video playback) as inspirations to shape the ultimate creative output. The business goal was to identify whether Facebook on feature phones could serve as an effective platform to drive brand resonance metrics of brand recall, message association and purchase intent via a Nielson Brand Effects study. The campaign ran across both markets for 6 weeks and also included smart phones to offer comparative learnings.

The results on feature phones were fantastic and some of the highest on record for Facebook in Asia-Pacific. In summary:

·       Ad recall was exceptionally high demonstrating the campaign was effective at driving brand awareness with feature phone users

·       Message association with ‘delicious tasting sweet snack that makes me happy’ demonstrated a statistically significant increase vs the baseline in both markets validating brand ownership of the message

.       Purchase Intent demonstrated significant increase vs baseline in both markets validating the campaign has made consumers more likely to buy Cadbury in the future

Peter Mitchell, Global Innovations Director at Mondelēz International said, “The great results from this study tells us Facebook on feature phones can serve as an effective platform to positively influence core brand metrics and can also serve as an effective medium to reach consumers of more mainstream demographic groups in emerging markets. We will be addressing this moving forward, working to build more tailored content, or commercial messages most relevant to the devises people actually use.”

Interestingly whilst brand recall was also very strong on smart phones, message association and purchase intent reads were below the results achieved on feature phones. Jonathan Rudd, Regional Digital Director at Carat said, “This could be because smart phone users have become accustomed to a richer content experience such as high resolution images and increasingly video. Therefore tailoring content to the capability of the device whilst still providing thumb-stopping content is key for a successful mobile campaign.”

“This campaign has validated that through feature phones we can reach millions more Mondelēz consumers in the Philippines, opening up the opportunity for us to have connected consumer experiences that integrate mobile to a wider audience, especially for mass based brands and categories, such as Tang, Biscuits and Cheese.  This is very exciting for future campaigns,” said Doroty Arroyo, Senior Brand Manager, Cadbury Dairy Milk Philippines

Mondelez launches the next phase of the Accelerator Programme in India this month, and following early successes will continue to make it an even bigger part of their ongoing global Facebook partnership.