The Challenge

How do you drive sales and brand awareness to an audience whose interest is changing? For Havana Club, this was their dilemma.

The drinks industry has faced significant headwinds during the last three years. Alcohol consumption in the UK has decreased, particularly in youger generations, and overall sales across Europe have been struggling, leaving drinks brands with a challenge.

For Julie Pender, former Creative Content Manager at Havana Club, it wasn’t good enough to be guessing at what might work. She wanted evidence-based ad data that would help Havana Club with optimising digital campaigns, achieving greater impact and trend-bucking results.

With a team split across multiple locations, Havana Club’s approach to its ad content and campaigns wasn’t addressing local concerns and lacked inspiring visual imagery. They needed to know if their digital ad messaging created for a global audience resonated with the UK audience. More than that, Havana Club needed this data during the campaign so that ad optimisation could happen in the moment, not when it was too late.

And that’s where we stepped in.

Key Obstacles

Lack of audience insight and a need to understand what motivates consumers to interact with Havana Club.
Limited data regarding what pushes consumers to buy
A lack of capacity for localisation led to catch-all messaging

“The secret sauce for Automated Creative, for me, are the consumer insights. The performance and ad optimisation are truly great but it’s the creative optimisation that truly is amazing, and it's absolutely necessary. That for me is what produces the actionable insights, and the deeper consumer learning that you get.”

Julie Pender

Former Creative Content Manager, Havana Club

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The Strategy

Havana Club needed evidence that would drive its creative output, inform budget allocation and build a strong brand voice. But to do that, it needed to see how its existing ads were performing and test different hypotheses to identify new opportunities for optimising digital campaigns. They needed to know what worked, why and where next.

The beauty of the Automated Creative (AC) platform, Creator, is that it doesn’t just automate output; it enhances it. All of Havana Club’s ads were tagged at an asset level in each social media channel, so they got creative analytics and insights that showed why its digital ads worked, not just what worked. And that gave Julie a clear answer to “what should we make next?”

All of these ads were optimised in real-time by Creator, meaning that Havana Club got to see what worked in which channel, why it worked and benefit straight away. No more waiting until the next campaign to implement or see results.

+ 40%

Uplift in impressions across all campaigns

+ 26%

Increase in video completions across all camapigns

+ 53%

84.76%

VCR on Snapchat with taste messaging

Havana Club: The Results

The AC approach provided Havana Club with intelligent insights that optimised its existing digital campaign and delivered great results. Experimenting with messaging allowed the brand to establish a voice for the first time, and ad insights changed how it delivered its assets by channel.

But the results weren’t just about immediate gains from this campaign. Havana Club can now move forward with evidence-based insights and focus for its future marketing campaigns and creative teams.

Serve content > brand content
Taste language > heritage language
Lifestyle visuals > bottle visuals

For Julie, this marketing campaign was about progression over perfection. And with the campaign helping Havana Club to stand out in a difficult market, it’s progress in the right direction.

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Optimising digital campaigns helped Havana Club understand its audience