Cadbury has launched a £3m integrated marketing campaign to promote its new Wispa hot chocolate drink. ‘The Frothy Beast’ features as the brand’s official character and has taken over Wispa’s official Twitter profile for the month of April.
Using YouGov’s social media analysis tool, SoMA, we can measure the success of Wispa’s campaign on Twitter throughout the month of April.
If we look at Wispa’s overall reach for the month, we can see that 7% of the UK Twitter population heard about Wispa on their Twitter feeds. If we break this down along demographic lines, we know that 54% of those who heard about Wispa in this period were female, while 50% were aged between 18-34. This data provides top line insights into Wispa’s campaign on Twitter for the month of April.
However, SoMA also shows a noticeable spike in reach on 18 April. On this day reach increased to 4.8% of the UK Twitter population, from just 0.5% on the previous day. So what was responsible for this anomalous increase in reach?
The five most popular words mentioned alongside Wispa on 18 April were, ‘frothout’, ‘winner’, ‘hamper’, and ‘win’. These popular words are almost identical to the popular words index on previous days, indicating that another explanation must exist for this increase in reach.
Other popular words heard alongside Wispa on 18 April (but not on other days) were ‘vodafone’ and ‘mtv’. By looking at the verbatim comments we can see that on 18 April the Guardian posted an article reviewing the best TV commercials for the week. This review featured the ad run by Wispa (featuring The Frothy Beast), as well as ads from Vodafone and MTV.
Overall this analysis indicates that less than 1% of the UK Twitter population heard about Wispa on any single day, except for 18 April. On that day we also know that the increase in reach was driven by a Guardian article reviewing Wispa’s latest TV commercial.
This insight could be used by Wispa to effectively monitor and adapt their social media campaign in real-time. Knowing exactly who was exposed to their brand, and combining that with an intimate knowledge of what was heard could be crucial in the development of future campaigns.
What this analysis also demonstrates is the inextricable relationship between social media activity and other media channels. This knowledge could be harnessed proactively by Wispa in order to increase and enhance their social media engagement, and coordinate online activity with traditional media advertising.
