The Background
Asahi Premium Beverages (now Carlton & United Breweries) are purveyors of Australia’s leading range of alcoholic and non-alcoholic drink brands. Their portfolio boasts some of the country’s most iconic ciders, ginger beers, RTDs, spirits and more from the likes of Somersby, Brookvale Union, and Vodka Cruiser (just to name a few).
Typically, Asahi Premium Beverages (APB) used ongoing trade activations (such as point-of-sale merch, posters as well as in-venue and in-store promotions) to support their on-premise and retail vendors.
But, APB was on the hunt for a new solution. They wanted to find creative and tech-driven tools that could help their customers drive more consumers into their venues and increase sales.
Since 2016, we’ve worked alongside APB and have been the driving force behind the Asashi Third Space program. Plus, we’ve been APB’s media agency of choice, servicing a portfolio of their iconic brands.
The Problem
Prior to partnering with us, APB’s trade team didn’t have digital activation tools that could be shared and leveraged by their clients. As for media buying, the approach to date was focused on individual brands, rather than strategically leveraging their entire portfolio in unique and dynamic ways.
This meant APB didn’t have tech on-hand to attribute sales back to digital campaigns. Plus, they were missing out on a powerful opportunity to cross-promote their products across multiple venues and audience groups. And that’s where Asahi Third Space came in.
The Solution
TP spearheaded the Asahi Third Space program and developed easily activated tech for APB to distribute with their on-premise and retail partners.
At the core of the program was our first proprietary tech, TP.Local (a platform we whitelabelled for Asahi Third Space). This tech enabled Asahi’s Sale Managers to allocate portions of their marketing budget to specific venues and retail stores to use on social media advertising.
The benefit of this was two-fold: stores had the budget to promote their venue, while Asahi benefited from their brands gaining exposure with retailer’s audiences.
Our TP.Local platform removed many of the barriers-to-entry that can hold retailers back from effectively promoting their business on social media. Rather than needing in-house graphic design and social advertising expertise, stores could choose from a series of pre-designed templates (or even create their own) to launch campaigns in minutes. Plus, APB footed the bill for these campaigns, putting budget in the hands of those on the frontline.
TP also provided APB as well as their portfolio of venues and retailers with real-time reporting dashboards. This gave everyone the data they needed to track and attribute conversions and return-on-investment. Plus, every campaign had in-built A/B testing capabilities that improved results month-on-month.
Unlike traditional agencies, our Strategy team enabled APB to improve their media buying strategy by seeing the whole picture. Instead of funnelling budget into specific products or brands, we opened the door to new opportunities, such as leveraging their entire ecosystem to upsell and cross-promote across brands.
Take this example: when a Vodka Cruiser buyer outgrows their favourite RTD, we introduced them to new and exciting Asahi products that are better suited to their evolving purchasing habits. That strategic shift extended the consumer’s lifetime value and gave us powerful new ways to retarget these data points.
The Results
Our pioneering Asahi Third Space digital program leveraged the reach of APB’s national portfolio to deliver hyper-local ads that were personal and relevant to consumers. With our leading tech by their side, we empowered local retailers with easy-to-use tools to deliver ads that spoke directly to their customers and lowered the cost of social advertising for APB at-scale.
By switching to a bottom-up media buying approach, we enabled APB to reap the benefits of sharing audiences and cross-promoting products across their portfolio to lower costs and boost results.
Our efforts were even recognised by ABinBev, Asahi Premium’s global parent company, and has gone on to transform how the business advertises and activates their local partners across the world.
Here are some of the stats we have to show for it.
Example 1 – Mist Wood Gin & BWS
Our tech was able to drive high quality, engaged audiences from Mist Wood Gin’s national social campaign into local BWS stores. Over a four week campaign period, we generated 153% incremental revenue and demonstrated substantial category growth for weeks after the campaign had wrapped.
Example 2 – Estrella Damm & Thirsty Camel
We gave APB the tools to facilitate a Facebook Ads campaign to announce the arrival of Estrella Damm in Thirsty Camel stores. By running the campaign only in Victoria, we were able to attribute in-store sales to local Facebook Ads. The result? Victoria showed a 710% YoY increase in sales (litres poured) compared to 15% in SA/NT and just 4% in WA.
Example 3 – QT Hotel & Nikka Whisky
The team from QT Hotel were hosting a Nikka Whisky Dinner at their on-site Yamagen Japanese Restaurant. Using our tech, QT Hotel was able to promote the event using social advertising. Within just 15 days of starting the campaign, the event had sold out and had generated 10,400 unique impressions, 217 clicks and a CPC of $0.49.