TORONTO – What does broccoli have to do with television? Everything, according to the Television Bureau of Canada (TVB). It recruited the cruciferous green vegetable to test, and to eventually prove, the power of television advertising.
The TVB was behind a five week television campaign starring broccoli that aired in British Columbia and Ontario in January. Using three, 30 second TV spots that pitted the vegetable’s “miraculous” health benefits against so-called miracles in life, not only did the campaign raise awareness and increase broccoli sales, it also led to fan-created Facebook pages and more than a dozen spoof commercials on YouTube.
“This case study definitively proves the on-going power of television advertising”, said Theresa Treutler, TVB president and CEO, to a crowd of broadcasters, advertisers and marketing types in Toronto recently. “It also demonstrates the effectiveness of television as the foundation for multi-screen communication strategies.”
What was most telling about the research, the first of its kind in Canada, was that the campaign relied solely on the TV spots, (click here to watch the first one), plus a simple HTML website to track results. It deliberately omitted any additional PR or media support.
Using media donated by TVB members in the two provinces, Treutler said that the spots were aired ROS (run of schedule), using an equally weighted mix of conventional and specialty TV stations “to replicate a normal TV schedule as much as possible, so as to not skew the results.”
“This, quite simply, exceeded our expectations”, she told Cartt.ca. “I was confident going in that the campaign would generate an increase in awareness, but what was an enormous surprise to us was the extension to the Web that this small campaign generated.”
Using social media metrics such as Radion 6 and Google Analytics, average mentions of “broccoli” or “miracle food” increased by 444% during the campaign and the weeks that followed. Search volume was up 100% versus the same period in 2008 and 2009. Broccoli’s fan page on Facebook attracted more than 17,000 followers, and over 30,000 were sufficiently intrigued by the television spots to watch them again on YouTube. An additional 20,000 people tuned in to watch the 15 spoofs that users created and posted on-line.
“Trying to develop that type of social network impact, or on-line impact, if you will, without TV is very difficult”, said AmoebaCorp’s Adam Zolis, the design firm behind the campaign, in an interview with Cartt.ca. “Getting a 30,000 person Facebook fan page in that period of time… that’s an annual target for a lot of brands. What’s interesting about this case is that (the campaign) was not supported by a social media strategy, it was simply what happened when you put TV commercials into the marketplace, what consumers did, and how they interacted with them.”
At the noon hour presentation, which featured broccoli as table centrepieces as well as the lunch’s side vegetable, Zolis revealed some other impressive metrics. Aided awareness for the campaign was nearly ubiquitous at 90% of respondents, while unaided ad awareness reached 65%, nearly 20 points ahead of research supplier norms for similar tactical campaigns.
In addition, top-of-mind awareness for broccoli went from receiving no mentions, to being the second most recalled item in the produce aisles. And the most rewarding metric of all? Broccoli sales shot up 8% year-over-year where the sales were tracked, with 13% of consumers saying they had purchased at least one more bunch of broccoli in their last shopping trip compared to the pre-campaign period.
Treutler said that the idea was conceived in 2009 in order to challenge widespread reports that TV’s popularity was waning. "We were so frustrated by these repeated misconstrued headlines talking about the death of television," she said.
And why broccoli?
"We needed to find a product that was a commodity product, not owned by anybody else, but a product that people didn’t hate, but also didn’t love", Zolis continued. “We couldn’t have something that was invented, but it had to be somewhat inane, and have a starting point that was fairly clean to get a good reach from the data.”
Click here for more on the broccoli television case study.
