PMG drove incremental restaurant visits and sales using emotion targeting

Challenge

Combatting consumer pullback with CTV marketing

In recent years, Quick Service Restaurants (QSRs), including major fast-food chains, have faced declining sales. This consumer pullback is largely attributed to rising prices, particularly as the costs of eating out have outpaced eating at home. Now, QSRs are competing for fewer customers, making it more important than ever to find new creative ways to market products and services to garner consumer attention and drive more sales.

Implementing BrandDiscovery targeting was simple, seamless, and incredibly turnkey, allowing us to focus on what matters most — serving up delicious food and creating memorable experiences for our guests. The best part? We were able to optimize our CTV targeting strategy without needing to allocate budget to DMP costs.

Doug Paladino

Programmatic Director
PMG

Solution

By aligning their client’s product with the right emotions, PMG more effectively motivated consumers

PMG’s client leveraged BrandDiscovery to run emotionally targeted CTV ads across Wurl’s network of premium content publishers. This approach aimed to enhance viewer engagement by more seamlessly connecting their ads to the CTV programs, aligning the emotions of the two to create ad breaks that felt like a natural continuation of the content rather than a disruption.

To deliver the right ad at the right time, BrandDiscovery uses GenAI to evaluate the emotions in both ads and program content. By analyzing video content just before an ad break, BrandDiscovery enables scene-level targeting, at no additional cost to the advertisers. This allowed the client to impact consumer emotions and motivate action, without extra markup on the cost of the media placements.

For PMG, Wurl developed custom QSR segments to target emotions related to craving and hunger. Wurl also partnered with Innovid for this campaign, allowing PMG to serve their creatives dynamically to those emotions and further personalize for location, with each asset promoting regional food specials. PMG improved the resonance of their food advertising by timing ads alongside programming content that evokes anticipation and joy, resulting in a measurable increase in visits and purchases.

Results

Emotion-based targeting produced positive attention and optimal results

InMarket, an independent measurement partner specializing in location and visit attribution, provided third-party validation of the campaign results.  Their analysis found that impressions delivered with emotion-based targeting drove a 40% lift in incremental restaurant visits and a 48% incremental increase in sales. Notably, emotion targeting was PMG’s most performant CTV strategy for boosting store visits for their QSR client.

Our marketing campaign utilizing BrandDiscovery’s emotional targeting and Innovid’s dynamic creative optimization struck such a chord with our audience that we’ve decided to keep it running as an evergreen strategy. Its success in driving engagement, site visits, and sales has solidified its place in our marketing mix. We’re proud to continue reaching our customers with this campaign, ensuring that our message remains vibrant and resonant.

Doug Paladino

Programmatic Director
PMG

¹ InMarket: [3/14/24-5/6/24] Attributed through geotargeting and credit card information.

PMG is a global independent marketing solutions and technology company that aims to inspire both people and brands. They leverage business strategy, creative, media, insights, and their proprietary platform to deliver personalized digital marketing. With 900 employees across offices in major cities worldwide, their work has earned them prestigious industry awards, including Cannes Lions and Adweek Media Plan of the Year.

Looking for a less disruptive ad experience?

Wurl’s BrandDiscovery classifies CTV content in real time, improving performance by matching ads to the context of what’s shown on screen directly before the ad break.
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