Ruffles

The Objective

The challenge of going beyond the obvious

Brand awareness is not something Ruffles is missing in Brazil. The challenge for the brand, sold in the country since the '80s and one of the most popular snacks around, is another one: how do you get people who love the product to think of it first when it's time to buy it?

The brand already had an answer in play: a well-planned, well-executed campaign, packed with creative and authentic content, designed to deepen the connection with the audience. But what if there were a way to push mid-funnel results even further? A new solution, maybe, to add to the media strategy?

The Solution

Consideration, insights and a very unusual habit

That solution exists, and it's called Brand Consideration Ads. It's a new TikTok ad format focused on getting the brand closer to the people who were already close to putting a bag of Ruffles in their shopping carts.

Consideration Ads speak directly to potential customers who are past the awareness stage and are actually thinking about buying, the so-called mid-funnel. This solution works along with TikTok Market Scope, our first-party insights platform, and helps the brand connect with an audience that delivers higher conversion rates and stronger brand-building results.(1)

When brands grow their consideration audiences, they see incremental lifts up to 4x higher in affinity, 3x higher in favorability, and also 3x higher in the perception that the brand sets trends and is unique.(2) Potential customers, one step closer to purchase.

For Ruffles, that meant using TikTok Market Scope and Brand Consideration Ads as a bridge between the already strong awareness of the "Viva Essa Onda" ("live this wave") message and a relationship with people ready to buy.

But of course, none of this tooling would go very far without a good creative concept behind it. The creative insight came exactly from TikTok Market Scope, where the brand spotted a pretty unusual behavior in its community: eating Ruffles with chocolate.

That habit turned into a recipe, which was reproduced by a whole team of creators hired by Ruffles in new pieces of content. The goal was for the brand to join the conversation without forcing it, instead of trying to build a new narrative from scratch. A strategy that combined insights and creators — and that would still get an extra push from Brand Consideration Ads to make it even more powerful.

The Results

A wave of good results

A multi-cell Brand Lift study set up by the brand showed that the creative insight resonated well with the TikTok community. Both the media plan with Brand Consideration Ads and the campaign without the solution had a positive impact on ad recall: a +8.8 points lift with the format and +8.5 pts lift in the strategy without it. The social listening plan hit the mark, and joining the conversation naturally instead of trying to start a trend also worked out well for Ruffles.

The difference made by the adoption of a new solution showed up further down the funnel.

The campaign that used Brand Consideration Ads stood out in message association, with a lift of +3.3 incremental points. That shows the "Viva Essa Onda" message, promoted through native creator content showing the unusual recipe, stuck even more with the people who were impacted by the ads.

But most importantly: the campaign with the new solution brought a lift of +2.7 points in purchase intent (directional index, with 80% significance). That means people who saw the consideration ads showed a higher propensity to pick Ruffles on their next trip to the store. Maybe to test the recipe and eat them with chocolate, who knows?

In practice, the campaign as a whole delivered a 21.9% incremental sales lift in the regions exposed to the campaign, according to LiveRamp's Sales Lift study. The methodology compares that sales volume with other areas that were not impacted by the brand's ads.

And what about Brand Consideration Ads? They accounted for 20% of the impact on that sales difference, even while reaching only 17% of the total consumers who saw the campaign. Working brand consideration on TikTok can indeed be an efficient way to turn already strong awareness into consistent brand and business results. Even more so when combined with a well-crafted strategy of social listening and native content, as Ruffles showed.