NICK’S MARKETING DIRECTOR HANNA GRANEBRING ON THE POWER OF CONTEXTUAL TARGETING
NICK’S IS A COMPANY WHICH SPECIALIZES IN HEALTHIER, SUGAR-FREE CANDY. IN ITS OWN WORDS, IT’S “A SWEDISH MISSION TO IMPROVE THE WORLD OF SNACKS.”
We are a Swedish brand, launched in 2017, with a focus around healthy snacks and ice cream. Our USP is that we offer sweets that are good for you – our products contain no sugar, artificial sweeteners, gluten or wheat.
So, we like to think we are doing our bit in the fight against sugar, and associated problems like people getting type two diabetes. We distribute and sell both online, via ecommerce platforms and in partnerships with stores.
We are in year three of our journey, and currently focusing on building distribution in extended markets – in the US for instance, where we are in the process of launching and building up the team. We’re also moving to other new markets via Amazon, like Italy and Spain. Plus, we are looking for new partners to distribute within store. Overall, we see what we’re doing as part of a big, growing trend - functional and healthy snacks.
We had initially started buying programmatically on advice from our media agency, in order to build reach. But we found in general there wasn’t all that much engagement – viewability was also low at times – overall, it just wasn’t all that sexy.
That was all quite audience and behavioural targeting-focused of course. Following on from that, when we were introduced to Adlede, they showed us there are other ways of approaching programmatic – with content, and context as a starting point instead.
While we, like every brand, have a target audience in mind – in fact, that is more like a series of different, distinct audiences – not just a single one. And also, by being very specific around audience, it turned out we were missing out on some of our most engaged, relevant potential customers. For us at least, targeting specific types of content, subjects and topic areas turned out to be much more effective than reaching narrow audience groups, wherever or whatever they were reading.
We live so much of our lives online now, so of course it’s important the web is regulated like everything else – and customers can feel secure about what’s happening with their personal data.
Part of that is of course helping people to understand better how the whole online advertising system works, and then make informed choices – that is basically the spirit of GDPR I think, even if it isn’t always as easy as it sounds to achieve.
From a marketing perspective, of course I want to know what consumers are most interested and engaged in, but I think there are also clear limits to that – for example, not following customers around and peppering them with ads in a robotic way. A consideration for the human, and user experience is what has been missing in a lot of cases in the execution of programmatic. But I do think this is where contextual targeting can mark a huge step forward.