Honig is one of the best-known food brands in the Netherlands. With the aim of producing a positive impact on brand knowledge and sales, a recent campaign allowed customers to win a box of fresh vegetables to create their own meals. The Marketing Mix Evaluator enabled Honig to see how advertising on YouTube worked alongside TV activity.
THE GOALS
Understand the impact of all media upon sales
Explore how a more diverse media mix can spread marketing messages wider
THE APPROACH
Ran campaign across TV and YouTube
Used Marketing Mix Evaluation to assess relative performance of different media
THE RESULTS
28% of YouTube contacts are incremental to TV
Short-term sales impact of YouTube is 4.6 times higher than TV
Sales of Honig products are mostly driven in supermarkets with TV forming the largest portion of advertising spend. However, a larger proportion of grocery shopping is now happening online, so digital marketing efforts are on the increase. In order to prove that online advertising could generate sales, Honig used the Marketing Mix Evaluator to measure how much incremental revenue the campaign generated, return on investment, the relative effect of online versus offline and how various types of media delivered on campaign aims. Honig partnered with market research experts GfK, who performed several studies on the effect of TV and YouTube video advertisements using the GfK Crossmedia Link platform.
"My big mission was to prove to the company that digital could move the needle in top-line growth. TV will never disappear, but in the long term things will move to digital. If you make amazing content you have to ensure the right people see it."
- Joris Veger, Head of Digital and E-commerce BeNeLux, Kraft Heinz
YouTube delivers incremental reach
The target audience of people 20 to 54 years old in the Netherlands measures 12.9 million, and after the second flight of the campaign 81% of this audience had been reached. GfK’s analysis showed that of those who saw the campaign on YouTube, 28% had not been reached by the TV campaign. The YouTube reach was most notable among those classified as light TV viewers – they accounted for 37% of the total number of viewers of the ad on YouTube, compared to 15% on TV.

YouTube yields a higher probability of purchase than TV
Based on single-source measurement of purchases and media consumption, the sales effect was assigned through regression analyses by GfK. The campaign on YouTube yielded a higher probability of purchase than TV – 23% compared to TV’s uplift of 5%.

"YouTube does not saturate as quickly as we expected, and it seems to be the ideal medium for multiple messages and pieces of content about multiple brands and brand benefits. We can send out a lot of different messages versus TV"
- Dustin Steinford, Social Media, Digital Marketing and E-Commerce Lead, Kraft Heinz
Conclusion
With e-commerce becoming more important for food purchases, Honig wants to ensure the brand stays relevant with a younger audience; 38% of those who saw the campaign on YouTube were between the ages of 18 and 29, compared with 17% of those who saw the ad on TV. Based on results like these, digital campaigns will remain an increasingly important addition to Honig’s offline activity into the future.
