The Strategy
Suntory Global Spirits UK needed evidence that would drive its creative output and prove that online ad campaigns could shift bottles off shelves. To do that, the work had to be designed around two clearly defined audiences and a creative engine capable of producing, and learning from, ad assets at scale.
The first audience was a broad national audience with a general interest in whisky, designed to build awareness of Jim Beam Peach and prime the wider UK market. The second was a tightly geo-targeted audience drawn from ASDA stores with traditionally strong Jim Beam sales, namely Nottingham, Leeds, Belfast, Doncaster and Newcastle, where the campaign needed to convert attention into checkout behaviour.
That split made it possible to optimise ads differently for each audience, run separate hypotheses in parallel and learn what triggered each group to act. The national audience could be tested on broader brand messaging, while the geo-targeted audience could be served sharper, more locally relevant targeted ads designed to drive in-store purchase.
Using AC's proprietary tool, the team produced over 150 individual online ads, a volume of ad content variation that simply isn't viable through traditional production. Each variant tested a different combination of visual, message and tone, so the campaign could quickly identify which creative triggers actually moved consumers and double down on what worked.
Crucially, every ad was tracked across both audiences. That meant the team didn't only learn which ads performed. They generated valuable insight into what creative triggers drove consumer actions, and could see how those triggers behaved differently at national level versus inside the geo-targeted footprint. The work effectively turned the launch into its own ad optimisation tool, feeding live ad insights straight back into how Suntory Global Spirits UK could optimise campaigns and scale ads against real consumer behaviour.
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