Sip, Taste, Repeat: Dynamic Advertising that Works for Jack Daniel’s Flavours
Introducing a new twist to a globally recognised brand isn’t easy, especially when your brand is as famous as Jack Daniel’s. Brown-Forman turned to Automated Creative to deliver effective ads for the new JD Flavours range, all while gathering important insights around what audience they should be targeting and how. As a result, their ads improved on the performance benchmark: equivalent to at least twice the media spend.
Brown-Forman’s Laura and Megan talking about working with Automated Creative
When Brown-Forman sought to introduce the Jack Daniel’s Flavours portfolio in the UK, they had a big challenge: How do you find new customers when everyone thinks they know you?
Jack Daniel’s is one of the best-known brands in the world, so it was coming up against a lot of preconceptions. At the same time, Brown-Forman wanted to create a data driven advertising campaign that could grow consideration of the new product while also showing them exactly why certain ads worked.
Automated Creative produced dynamic ads that overperformed against benchmarks on Meta and Snapchat, drove product consideration, and generated a wealth of insights for Jack Daniel’s core audience and beyond. At MAD//Fest 2023, Laura McCarthy, Senior Brand Manager, and Megan Davies, Digital Marketing Lead for UK and Ireland, shared their journey.
A creative effectiveness challenge
Everyone’s heard of Jack Daniel’s. Whether you drink whiskey or not, you probably have an opinion on the brand. But why would a non-whiskey drinker become interested in a new flavour of the brand they’ve chosen not to buy so far? And why would a Jack & Coke drinker switch to Jack Daniel’s Apple?
Brown-Forman wanted to create a marketing campaign that challenged assumptions, while staying true to the Jack Daniel’s brand ethos. They wanted to know why their ads worked and to increase their media value, too. It became clear, through their research, that they needed to choose the right theme to communicate the right brand identity and to localise content for the markets the product was being launched in.
Instead of continuing with a linear creative approach, Brown-Forman “turned to Automated Creative to create a more loop like process.”
This meant creating dynamic ads, personalised by platform, that would test different themes and be updated with what elements worked best. Testing allowed Brown-Forman to ask lots of questions - from which flavours people liked, to what context would make them buy the product, to what images were more attractive.
Outperforming benchmarks with ad automation
Automating the ad production and testing multiple themes and combinations of messages led to more effective and efficient marketing for Jack Daniel’s Flavours. And it brought up some interesting, sometimes unexpected insights.
Firstly, Brown-Forman learnt that non-whiskey drinkers were more engaged with Flavours advertising. This showed them that this range could be the one to bridge the gap over to a new audience.
Secondly, this exercise in ad automation and testing proved how different messaging and themes perform differently on different social media platforms. What worked on Meta didn’t necessarily have the same results on Snapchat, and vice versa. This is invaluable in driving media value going forward.
And thirdly, Brown-Forman learnt that the previous leading theme of their Jack Daniel’s ads was not working as well for the brand anymore. They now have new themes and new imagery to build advertising strategy around in the future.
But, what were the outcomes of the AC ads? Laura and Megan told the MAD//Fest audience how they were able to improve and overperform against all benchmarks on their media spend. The new ads showed a 170% improvement on Facebook and Instagram and 112% on Snapchat.
Moreover, this was just a pilot within Brown-Forman. With the proven concept and lessons learnt, Laura shared how they were able to adjust out-of-home messaging as well and obtain best-in-class scores for those ads. More widely, this performance-led advertising approach is improving effectiveness and efficiency at Brown-Forman overall:
“This kind of messaging testing really helps us fuel and feed into [the brand] toolkits and make sure we're driving the best creative messaging that then goes out across the different markets. So we're really excited about the results that happened with Automated Creative. It's a real step change to the way that we are approaching messaging and creative and how we talk to our consumers at Brown-Forman.”
Watch the full presentation: