#MobExAwards 2021 highlight: BAT's Valentine's Day surprise for Indonesian female consumers

Most people are in the mood for love on Valentine's Day and British American Tobacco wanted to tap on the mood by targeting women to promote its oral nicotine pouch Velo. However, it was rare for women to be successfully targeted for nicotine products in Indonesia so BAT faced the challenge of doing it successfully. It partnered up with Udara Segar and ADA to come up with a campaign titled "Nicotine Hampers For Your Valentine! Why Not?", which resulted in the company being listed as a finalist for Best Use of Promotions at MARKETING-INTERACTIVE's MobEx Awards 2021.

Challenge

Its oral nicotine pouch, Velo, was launched last September featuring three flavours: Tropical Breeze, Ruby Berry and Polar Mint. The launch was entirely digital in nature, which given the pandemic situation and the new rituals BAT was introducing for nicotine satisfaction, required constant activations to generate buzz and interest.

When the Valentine season rolled around, BAT, Udara Segar and ADA wanted to latch on to the opportunity and had the unconventional idea of targeting women with a Valentine offer for Velo. However, nobody had targeted women for nicotine products in Indonesia in the past successfully. Hence, BAT was sceptical about how this can be done.

Strategy

BAT and its agencies sought to execute something unique, different and never seen before in the nicotine category. Women were of particular interest to BAT as they comprised 55% of its website visitors and were driving purchases more than men, even though nicotine products are typically associated with the latter group in Indonesia. 

Seeing this opportunity, it decided to leverage women to drive purchase and usage of Velo by riding on the Valentine gifting moments, which was also changing drastically during the pandemic with people now expressing their love online. BAT came to this conclusion using data from Think with Google, which indicated an over 100% growth in searches for "gift card online" globally and an 80% increase in “online gift” in 2020 versus 2019.

At the same time, BAT also found that ruby was associated with Valentine's Day on Google Trends 2021 and it recognised that women always love ruby diamonds. Tying all these findings together, BAT decided to offer a unique Valentine's Day gift of Velo Ruby Berry done in collaboration with perfume start-up Labcitane. 

Execution

Firstly, BAT, Udara Segar and ADA created a single consumer view using audiences from its offline activation programs and digital advertising touchpoints. From these, the team identified consumers interested in nicotine products and segmented them. Using its first-party data, BAT prioritised retargeting women interested in tobacco and nicotine products. To amplify the reach, the team used lookalike audiences on Tradedesk, Facebook and GDN.

The team also booked keywords of “Valentine’s Day” and “Valentine Hampers” to broaden our reach for the programme. At the same time, it engaged its main KOL, Anya Geraldine, to share her experiences using nicotine products to provide a perspective that women in the target audience could easily relate to.

Results

Being bold and challenging the norms paid off as the results from the Valentine Ruby Berry campaign reflected great success. According to BAT, the campaign over-achieved its target in two weeks rather than in a month. It drove over 54 million total impressions throughout two weeks and had a total reach of over 45 million from all campaign touchpoints.

BAT also saw a 191k increase in website traffic and session durations also increased by two times the amount. The bounce rate also improved from 64% in January to 54% during the campaign. Most importantly, BAT successfully delivered a purchase increase of 123% during the campaign period versus January among women, while the increase among men was 68% versus January. Additionally, the campaign resulted in a spike in social media conversations.