Every summer Walls faces fierce competition in securing every day snackers in buying Wall’s ice-cream over opposing brands at snacking moments , due to a highly saturated Ice-cream market. The market is crowded with private labels & like for like brands who are all competing for Ice-cream consumers’ minds and decisions at the same time due to being a seasonality driven product.

The Wall’s Talking Ice Cream campaign has been an annual recurrence for Unilever since 2017, with all aspects of the campaign evolving from one year to the next; due to the success of the campaign, the budget & number of markets increases each year (2018 8 Vs 2019 15 markets).

2019 was no different – with the main objective being, to become the favourite accessible hunger -filling/refreshing on -the-go snack across all selected 15 European Markets, ultimately ending with driving all potential consumers to on-the-go to Walls points of sale . Our challenge was to find a way to drive and identify footfall to prove positive ROI in a highly fragmented market that converts offline, while increasing unaided brand recall, market share & penetration – all whilst considering the highly fractured nature of cross European media landscapes highly varied levels of media sophistication.

Due to the challenges of the campaign and the scale/impact required . We had to think carefully when selecting a media partner to work with. We selected, geo­ location partner Blis – as they enabled us to have scale across all 15 markets, however control the budget and optimisations centrally.

As part of our partnership with Blis for Talking Ice Cream. Blis re-purposed all of our pre-existing out of assets – creating bespoke creatives per market which included, an dynamic store locator feature which would show our audiences live locations to the nearest Walls ice-cream cabinets. Because we provided Blis with our top POS locations across the 15 markets. Blis was able to use real-world intelligence to send contextually relevant messages to our audiences, when they were in distance of a selected POS and in a purchase ready moment i.e. sunny weather & midday vs. early morning.

Talking Ice Cream can be identified as successful based on our two primary objectives; driving consumers to POS and increasing unaided brand recall .

We were able to crack the challenge of online impressions converting offline in small retailers through our media partner Blis. It was demonstrated that the campaign drove a 20% cross-market uplift in footfall, post Blis ad-exposure into store, through using mobile phone ad request longitude & latitude data to track user locations post ad request for those exposed & an unexposed control audience . The average footfall uplift across markets for the ice-cream category is expected between 7-12% based on previous Blis campaigns.

Alongside our Blis activity, On-Device conducted Brand Study research (DE, UK, FR & IT). The study consisted of a sample size of 400 – and allowed for bespoke brand questions to be served to both control and exposed groups. The aim of the study was to measure brand awareness, ad-recall , consideration, purchase intent, creative performance . We succeeded with increased purchase intent across the board{+3%), increased spontaneous awareness in every market +10% (in particular UK +17% uplift and DE +12 %.)

In line with the key objective, TIC also increased consumers perception +10% uplift “Walls ice cream is refreshing in hot weather” and best portfolio range perception vs. competitors +18%.

Most importantly, we are able to see positive sales & share results from the UK. Blis store-locator asset led consumers exclusively to Tesco express stores nationally . On the Bank Holiday weekend, Wall’s Impulse single sales were up+ 75%. With Feast & Calippo experiencing the highest uplift and being the only two products featuring in the UK creative.

Lastly, possible Halo effect on in-home Wall’s multipacks experienced share gain for the first time with +412BPS Vs YTD -120BPS.