Helping Fans Get “Hands-On” During the Holidays to Inspire Seasonal Shopping

Case Study: Pacific Foods' Leftovers Upgrade Promotion

Pacific Foods tapped Maxwell to highlight its high-quality pantry staples – mainly broths and plant-based beverages – timed with the holiday cooking season. Knowing that Pacific’s fans love new recipes and personalized content, we set out to create an interactive digital campaign that would bring into focus the convenience and versatility of the brand’s products, while also embracing a popular (and sometimes controversial!) theme: leftovers.

The Campaign

During the key holiday sales period for Pacific Foods, we engaged fans with a seasonally-driven digital campaign pairing Thanksgiving leftovers like pumpkin pie and turkey, with the brand’s Organic Chicken Broth and Hemp Plant-Based Beverage. To maked tired leftovers fun and help consumers discover new ways to use their meal time extras, we created an interactive video inviting them to choose a leftover, add ingredients and, finally, share the recipe to enter to win prizes.

Strategy

To reach our entry and video view goals, we:

Engaged consumers with original content featuring leftovers at the peak time they’re seeking inspiration
Tapped into known affinity for gamification and personalized content by creating interactive “choose-your-own-adventure” video
Drove awareness as well as entries, video views and post engagement via a targeted paid social campaign spanning Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and Twitter
Encouraged sign-ups to Pacific’s e-newsletter through entry form submissions to better communicate with fans in the future

In addition, all recipes were hosted on the brand’s site to help drive product usage.

Development Process

We started by identifying a video platform that allowed us to invite fans to create a recipe personalized to their tastes. Next up, was mapping out a this-or-that decision tree structure, ultimately leading users to one of 12 unique leftover recipes. The final step was filming step-by-step videos demonstrating each of the dozen potential recipes users could create. For continuity and to keep the video content as consistent as possible (lighting, props, etc.), we filmed the video sections in a single day – a successful feat thanks to thorough pre-planning and test-runs.

Results

Leftover Upgrade’s interactive format and timely content theme resulted in more than 95K video views, 63K sweepstakes entries (more than 2x our goal) and 3.1M impressions. Furthermore:

More than 500 entrants came back to comment for a bonus entry – many @mentioning a friend to encourage them to enter, too
33% more video completions than sweepstakes entries suggests many visitors enjoyed the concept and returned to “play again”
More than 7 out of every 10 entrants opted to receive Pacific’s e-newsletter– 4x our goal

97% of total impressions were attributed to the paid social campaign, earning more than 22K link clicks to the entry page