Objectives

The holiday season is a key moment for S.Pellegrino, which has long held a place on consumers’ holiday tables to elevate special moments and dining experiences. In 2019, S.Pellegrino established Friendsgiving as a pillar moment for the brand, launching a campaign that extended beyond the traditional holiday celebrations and proved successful with consumers.

In planning for the second year of Friendsgiving, we wanted to build upon the success of the previous year, but COVID-19 presented the challenge of communicating with consumers during a truly unique holiday season. Our challenge was to make S.Pellegrino relevant to consumers when entertaining and gatherings were different — either going virtual or being cancelled all together.

Pivoting away from the typical concept of holiday entertaining “tips & tricks,” we planned to create an inspiring Friendsgiving and holiday celebration campaign that adapted to COVID-19 restrictions while still driving awareness, consideration, and trial of S.Pellegrino during the 2020 holiday season. The objective was to create a 360-campaign encompassing paid, earned, and owned touchpoints with full funnel KPIs inclusive of Impressions, Sweeps Sign Ups, CTR, and ROAS.

Strategy and Execution

After the success of our 2019 campaign, we had the results to support our continued activity in 2020.

However, 2020 wasn’t just the year of COVID-19; we saw social unrest, and through the election, a deeply divided nation. As we developed our strategy in July, we took this into account as we imagined the 2020 holiday season: potential gathering restrictions, and an election occurring as our campaign began.

From this, we developed the following:

Consumer Insight:

This year, I want the holiday season to be a time to be grateful for those who have been there for me during a challenging year, always showing me the richness of life, of new experiences, and of the little pleasures that uplift my senses and enhance my every day.

Brand Strategy:

Celebrate the individuals people surround themselves with — their chosen family — wherever they are, by coming together over delicious food, influenced by the love and diversity of flavors and experiences. Their chosen family might not live nearby, but they always feel close. More than ever, this holiday season is the time to recognize the spirit of togetherness by celebrating friends connecting over food.

These insights and strategy became our big idea: S.Pellegrino presents Our Food, Our Stories: A virtual celebration of food, showcasing how it brings us together with our chosen family no matter the distance, and highlights the memories that helped shape us.

Our Food, Our Stories came to life through an 8-part video series featuring celebrity chef Kristen Kish, who invited consumers into her kitchen with S.Pellegrino during the holiday season as she recreated cherished recipes virtually with her closest friends and family. The campaign launched with four Friendsgiving episodes; then media was refreshed with four holiday episodes. In addition to showcasing our videos and recipes on our organic social channels and landing page, we executed the campaign through the following tactics:

Paid Social: Geo-targeting around key markets, we optimized this portion of the campaign on CPM. In addition to our ad units, we created two unique Instant experiences, a first for the brand.

Earned Media & PR: We pitched Our Food, Our Stories and our celebrity chef to national media to spark awareness and engagement. Coverage kicked off with an exclusive chef interview in Forbes and led to top-tier coverage in outlets that include: People, today.com, Yahoo! News and MSN.

Influencers: We engaged top-tier influencers ranging from recipe creators to entertaining gurus to promote the campaign and recreate Kristen’s Friendsgiving recipes.

Sweepstakes:

To encourage consumers to share their holiday traditions with the S.Pellegrino community, we launched a sweepstakes incentivizing engagement. By sharing with #OurFoodOurStories or submitting online, consumers were entered to win a virtual holiday consultation with Kish along with other prizes, and S.Pellegrino.

E-Commerce:

To drive consideration and trial of S.Pellegrino, we created shoppable recipes that paired with S.Pellegrino’s portfolio. We also developed an e-commerce media plan to drive consumers to our recipe pages.

Results

Our Food, Our Stories exceeded goals across our two objectives: awareness and consideration/trial.

Awareness:

• • Paid Social: 62MM impressions, +40% more efficient than benchmark
  • Instant Experience delivered +3% CTR and +33% Avg. View Time above Nestlé Waters North America results
  • Earned Media: 335+MM impressions
  • Influencers: 3.3+MM impressions, 16.5K engagements

Consideration & Trial:

• • Sweeps: 8,000 sweeps entries with more than half opting in for emails
  • E-commerce was key in helping us reach our goals with an exciting ROAS over-delivery.
    • Delivered 86.7M impressions with a unique reach of 25.8M.
    • The campaign outperformed targeted ‘Grocery’ category benchmarks in key metrics like CTR (+59%), DPVR (+15%), and ROAS (+110%).

Media