When the 2020 pandemic hit, lockdowns across Europe shut down much of the food and service industry. For the world’s second-largest brewer, that lockdown in the Netherlands cut deeply into profits. Heineken wanted to compensate by running a local advertising campaign, focused on driving foot traffic to points of sales across the Netherlands.
At the same time, paper advertising didn’t cut it. Heineken wanted to drive traffic to its supermarket partners – while maintaining control over budgets and ad spend. That means choosing digital. And, Adcombi’s Hyperlocal ad technology made that possible.
Combining Display, Hyperlocal Technology & GPS Navigation Apps
Heineken ran a multi-media campaign across Facebook, YouTube, and Display Ads. The campaign promoted 4 major supermarket chains, with promotions targeting potential customers in a 2-3km radius from the physical store location. Heineken wanted to drive foot traffic to its grocery store partners. Here, they selected some 600 physical points of sale, including Albert Heijn, Jumbo, Plus, and Deen supermarkets.
Each ad targeted the specific beer brand for Amstel, Heineken, and Affligem, offered in a promotion by that local supermarket, with added information including store address, route information, weather, and stock API.
Adcombi’s campaign primarily focused on mobile users, targeting users in a radius from the store based on population density. The ad used our best-practice recommendations including:
- Standard elements such as copy, images, logos, products, opening hours, and weather. This kept all ads uniform to enable brand recognition, even if users weren’t familiar with the local store.
- Real-time Data Elements – Adcombi used APi to link to a weather feed and a traffic feed, updating ads accordingly.
- API stock (where available), sharing real-time remaining stock of beer involved in the promotion to create a sense of urgency to buy now, or to remove the promotion for the specific store when the selected product was no longer in stock.
- Maps, with route-planners to the store, so customers clicking the ad open Google Maps or another navigation app, with directions to the nearest store with the promotion. Rather than directing each ad to a local store landing page, customers were directed to route planning, so they could quickly go pick up the promotion before it sold out.
- CTA with a relevant offer or incentive to purchase the product, in this case, a discount.
Adcombi’s hyperlocal technology also allowed every one of the 600+ supermarkets to have its own line on the DSP. That enabled individual targeting settings, unique geographic radius settings based on local population density and competitor density, budget allocation per store from the national campaign, and drive extra awareness for the point of sale, with address and other details included in the ad.
A Successful Campaign with an ROI of 2.0
Adcombi’s proprietary hyperlocal ad technology allowed Heineken to push 600+ local ad campaigns per week, increasing exposure for three of its brands across the region. Adcombi’s technology is estimated to have saved 148 hours during setup over doing the campaign manually. This includes time saved automating planning, automating, and reporting phases – which significantly decreased Heineken’s operational costs and time expenditure. And, with an ROI of 2.0, or a 200% sales increase over the previous week, the hyperlocal ads significantly impacted sales for the target stores.
Finally, with individual store reports, points of sale involved in the promotion were able to see individual insights on a store level – allowing Heineken to offer value back to the participating supermarkets.
