With the goal of optimizing the advertising costs for the Johnnie Walker Blue Label product, Diageo, the world's largest distilled spirits manufacturer, invested in the use of artificial intelligence. Through Vidmob, a leading global platform in AI-based creative performance that uses data analysis to drive marketing results for major brands, Diageo achieved a 68.8% reduction in CPM (cost per thousand impressions) for its campaign.
The "Deserves a Blue" campaign, with videos on Instagram and Facebook, aimed to expand the single message of the product to fans and consumers of Blue Label whisky. Associated with a sophisticated lifestyle, Scottish whiskey has been gaining increasing popularity in Brazil. Data from the Scotch Whisky Association reveal that the country has become the fourth largest market for Scotch whisky in the world, with a 215.2% growth post-pandemic.
In the case of the Johnnie Walker Blue Label campaign, Vidmob's exclusive tool analyzed, frame by frame, all the elements present in the videos' creatives during their broadcast on Meta's social networks, as well as the more than 39.5 million user impressions, such as reactions, comments and shares.
As a recommendation for Diageo, Vidmob suggested starting the creatives with impactful messages. Just like in the initial guidelines for "Deserves a Blue," the uniqueness argument – with messages "Only one in every 10,000 barrels can deliver the flavor of Blue Label" and "A blend made with the most extraordinary Scottish whiskeys" – was 8.09% more effective when using videos up to 15 seconds long.
However, the how-to pitch – with the message “Pour 45ml of Blue Label into a whiskey glass without ice” – performed extremely well with shorter creatives, reaching 9.76% CPM.
Colors also played a fundamental role in the insights generated by Vidmob. Throughout the campaign, the warm yellow tones did not align well with Blue Lake's messages. The recommendation was to use gold at the beginning of the creatives, but prioritize blue in the middle to the end scenes, achieving a 30.11% increase in CPM.
"With Vidmob's AI, we realized that the gold color, common in all whiskies, was not as impactful as the blue color. With these insights, we were able to focus on the main creative recommendations for the campaign and at the same time optimize media investment in our ads. Notably, by replacing gold with blue, performance improved," says Lindsay Stefani, head of media, data, growth, and brand experience at Diageo.In other words: the use of AI provided actionable insights for the creative team in a highly efficient partnership on this ground-breaking campaign.
Animations that featured scenes focused solely on the movement of the liquid performed poorly in the new campaign, with a decrease in CPM. To reverse this situation, Vidmob recommended prioritizing the image of the bottle highlighting the glass and Blue Label label.
"Vidmob has been empowering campaigns for major brands, and it was no different with Blue Label's media actions. The videos that were already running on social media had an even more significant result after the insights generated by our Artificial Intelligence. Images like the bottle, for example, make more sense in those few seconds that need to capture attention and catch the audience's eye," says Miguel Caeiro, Head of Latam at Vidmob.It is important to highlight that with the reduction of CPM, it is possible to optimize campaigns, expand the brand's reach, and reach a larger number of people more effectively.
