Little Moons

The Objective 

Little Moons mochi desserts have become one of the most sought-after ice cream products in the UK. Having launched on TikTok back in 2020, the brand brought its Japanese-inspired snack to a totally new audience, creating viral moments and impressive campaigns along the way. But how did Little Moons truly measure the impact of their marketing efforts beyond topline figures?

In a bid to gain granular-level insight into their activity on TikTok, Little Moons joined forces with Magic Numbers to dig deeper into the data – informing their future plans, and helping to hone in on a new strategy to take their brand to new heights.

The Solution

In January 2021, Little Moons achieved a dream of many brands on TikTok – a viral moment. A simple video of a young woman searching for Little Moons in Tesco quickly caught on, encouraging young people to imitate her post during the pandemic. Almost overnight, the brand was a smash hit, attracting millions of views for both the videos and the #littlemoons hashtag – not to mention their countless new fans. According to PMW, Little Moons’ sales experienced a huge surge of 1,400% in Tesco following their viral moment, with the brand seeing its biggest ever sales week in UK grocery ever across all retail partners. 

Alongside their paid activity from 2021-2023, Little Moons were looking to measure the true impact of their campaigns and content on driving sales through econometrics with Magic Numbers. Having the data granularity to go beyond just monthly spend and impression data was crucial to capture the true effect of TikTok’s performance for Little Moons, enabling the brand to justify and steer future investment on TikTok as a channel. 

Through TikTok's Media Mix Modelling Data Pipeline (MMx), TikTok was able to provide much more granular daily data to Magic Numbers to include in their models – including comments, shares, likes, sends, video views, impressions, and completed + 2-second views. The MMx data allowed Magic Numbers to test multiple metrics and compare them to find the best explanatory variable for sales. This led to a significant increase in the strength of the models, meaning Magic Numbers and Little Moons were able to have more confidence in the accuracy and robustness of TikTok's performance in driving sales.

The Results 

Providing access to TikTok's MMx data improved the robustness of the model results and encouraged Little Moons to dramatically increase TikTok spend moving forward. 

The results showed that TikTok was the most cost-efficient channel for Little Moons (30% higher ROI than other channels on average), while also confirming that TikTok has a longer decay rate than other social channels, meaning advertising on TikTok is more memorable than other social channels. TikTok's decay rate (5-15 weeks) actually shows that the platform behaves more like an AV (TV/VOD) than a social channel which should be taken into consideration when planning media. 

The econometrics results also show a continuing impact on sales more than two years on from Little Moons' viral content (15% of marketing driven sales in 2023). This more than justifies a focus on organic content, and proves its ability to play a key role in driving sales alongside paid activity, which accounts for the majority of marketing driven sales (59%). This winning combination of thumb-stopping organic content on its TikTok profile, supported by a targeted ad strategy, really helped deliver for Little Moons.