Ovomaltine

The Objective

Daily grind feeling a bit stale?

Wake up and taste Ovomaltine (@ovomaltine)! The brand’s delicious Crunchy Cream spread is sure to add a bit of crunch back into your life.

Since its market introduction in Germany, Ovomaltine Crunchy Cream is successfully mixing up the sweet bread spread category as Nr. 3 brand with its incredibly unique crunchy bread spread – made without any palm oil. In Switzerland, the brand has evolved into a beloved staple household brand since 1904, whereas the German consumer still perceives Ovomaltine as a relatively new brand. Therefore, the aim of Ovomaltine has been to further leverage the market potential of the sweet bread spread category in Germany, spreading the news about its delicious Crunchy Cream.

The challenge for TikTok was to raise brand awareness for Ovomaltine Crunchy Cream among the target group of young adults and build the campaign on Ovomaltine’s existing communication strategy.

With its sights set on this goal and as part of a test and learn approach, the brand and its agency partner Crossmedia launched a campaign using traditional media as well as on several digital platforms. TikTok played a special role as a challenger channel with the aim of answering two key questions:

Could it be used to achieve valuable brand awareness results? If so, what would work better – a remix of existing advertising material, or assets from creators in the native style of user-generated content (UGC)? And, looking further ahead, could TikTok be a key pillar in the Ovomaltine media mix in future?

The Solution

Through a holistic media and measurement approach, a high-impact media and production plan was developed using TikTok Creative Exchange and testing the hypothesis through a multi-cell Brand Lift Study.

For their media plan, the brand developed a clever bundling approach for its creatives: TopView Ads, the first ads that TikTok users see when they open the app, were crafted to drive buzz. With the help of TikTok Pulse, the content was then delivered in a highly effective position to drive further awareness in a contextual environment.

For their production plan, Berlin-based agency Joli proved an effective partner for Ovomaltine. Together, they proactively experimented with existing branded assets and UGC to test the impact of both groups of content in terms of ad recall, brand awareness, and purchase intent. 18 existing creatives were remixed for release on TikTok, while 19 new assets with perfect brand messaging were specially produced for the platform by creators.

With their measurement plan in mind, Ovomaltine chose to apply rigid experimentation to understand and measure the impact of their campaigns and to test which types of assets perform better: remixed brand assets or UGC style creatives. The multi-cell Brand Lift Study was the perfect tool to measure the efficacy of adjusting their voice and style to align with the TikTok audience and to assess the impact of each type of creative on ad recall, brand awareness and purchase intent.

The Results

• +24.9 ppt. Uplift in ad recall vs. TikTok benchmark +8.1 ppt.

• Significant awareness lift vs. control group for both test cells remix & net-new

• +141% increase in Brand Awareness and +230% increase in average watch time vs. previous campaign

Both test cells in the Brand Lift Study and both types of creative content – the UGC and the freshly remixed brand content – achieved fantastic results in ad recall and awareness and made the campaign a resounding success above TikTok benchmarks. Compared to the previous campaign, in which no existing assets were optimized for TikTok, the brand was able to increase awareness by an incredible 141%, while video watch time lengthened by 230% driven by UGC content.

What’s more, ad recall was boosted by 24.9%, reaching a level that was 8.1% over the TikTok benchmark. The UGC-style creator content was the main driving force behind this excellent result. This content and the data from the Brand Lift Study showed in impressive style how ad experiments can be carried out on TikTok extremely effectively, allowing valuable insights to be gleaned for optimizations of budgets and segmentations.

In conclusion, the campaign setup as well as the test and learn approach made in cooperation between TikTok, Crossmedia GmbH, Joli Berlin and Ovomaltine was a full ‘crunchy’ success with outstanding results where UGC worked better than branded assets and confirmed all hypotheses of a match made in media heaven.