Sev­eral chal­lenges were faced when design­ing this pro­gram, not the least of which was the lack of any gro­cery ingre­di­ents for e-commerce pur­chas­ing on this retail destination’s website. Consequently, Media­tive was called upon to develop a des­ti­na­tion that could drive an offline buy­ing deci­sion – con­nect­ing the online ecosys­tem with in-store purchase.

Work­ing with our inter­nal team at both Media­tive and this retail des­ti­na­tion, a deci­sion was made to base the entire dig­i­tal solu­tion around down­load­able recipes that could be printed and socially shared online through the Hol­i­day Bake Cen­tre microsite. Ven­dor co-op media (includ­ing large Hero Ban­ners & an eNewslet­ter blast tar­geted to just under a quar­ter mil­lion loyal shop­pers) were uti­lized, fur­ther sup­ported by tra­di­tional IAB-banners across its web­site and SEM tac­tics were used to drive exter­nal traffic.

The site launched six weeks prior to Christmas. The fol­low­ing site per­for­mance sta­tis­tics were noted over the program’s life span:

• 45,000 indi­vid­ual Cana­di­ans vis­ited the Hol­i­day Bake Cen­tre at least once
• 20,000 vis­ited at least one addi­tional time over the program’s course.
• A total of just under 70,000 Cana­di­ans vis­ited the Hol­i­day Bake Cen­tre in total
• The eBlast was the sin­gle largest dri­ver of traf­fic to the Recipe Centre
• Doc­u­mented activ­ity was noted, with site users actively down­load­ing recipes and fol­low­ing up in-store to pur­chase nec­es­sary ingredients. Recipes were viewed – on aver­age – for between 5 to 10 min­utes by end users (com­pared to an aver­age time spent on page of 10–30 sec­onds on the retail site.)
• Ban­ners fea­tur­ing recipes (as opposed to straight vendor-branding) per­formed sig­nif­i­cantly better

The net result was a noted lift in same store sales among the products/ingredients fea­tured in the pro­gram; fur­ther, a larger address­able bas­ket was also wit­nessed by this company. Buyer sup­port was enhanced over the program’s life, as he wit­nessed first hand cus­tomers going in-store with recipes to com­plete their pur­chase funnel. Key learn­ings about what worked best were also incor­po­rated into an Easter cam­paign which Media­tive will be design­ing / exe­cut­ing in the com­ing weeks.

Stay tuned for news of more Media­tive part­ner­ships and mar­ket­ing strategies.


Biography / Resume : John Fanous is Mediative’s targeted media specialist with expertise in the interaction between traditional and new media; espousing optimized programs for clients that help them target critical buyers with maximum impact. He currently manages the Walmart.ca Vendor Co Op National Online Solutions team at Mediative, Walmart’s exclusive online media partner in Canada.