The Multiplier Effect of Social Business Tools

No matter how well your company is doing on social media, it’s probably dwarfed by how popular Oreo cookies are online: the Oreo Facebook page had over 35.9 million likes at last count.

Oreo is part of Mondelez International, a company created from the split of Kraft Foods in early October of 2012. It’s a $35 billion global snack-food company with brands that include Oreo cookies, Cadbury chocolates, Trident gum, Ritz crackers and LU biscuits.

B. Bonin Bough, who goes by Bonin Bough, is vice president of global media and consumer engagement for Mondelez International. His role, he says, is to “think about how we transform the way we engage consumers from a communications standpoint.”

In a conversation with David Kiron, executive editor for MIT Sloan Management Review’s Big Idea Initiative, Bough explains how social media can help increase the reach of TV ads, how the company is using geo-location marketing to target customers on their morning commutes and how the company’s Mobile Futures program helped to bring innovation into the company.

Could you describe what kinds of business problems your organization is trying to address with social tools and social media?

There are two real business challenges right now, and they are consumer retention — how do you continue to communicate with the consumer over time, how do you keep them retained and engaged in your brand — and consumer attention. So, attention and retention.

What kinds of activities are you doing with social to help address those issues?

Let me give a little background on my role. My boss who hired me at the time said, “We as an organization fundamentally believe that all media is digital, and we want a digital person to help chart the future of media.” What I think people don’t understand is the fundamental shift that that provides.

If you look inside of most organizations, there’s a digital guy and a traditional guy, and never the twain shall meet. They constantly fight over budget. The digital guy maybe sits with a maximum of 20% of the budget, the traditional sits with 80%, and building platforms that work together trying to solve the challenges of one or the other don’t actually happen.

So if you look at television, it’s a massively huge traditional piece of media. At the same time, we know that consumer engagement on that platform continues to decrease, primarily because of mobile devices and social media. So the moment that a commercial comes on, it automatically becomes time for me to text, or time for me to surf Twitter, or time for me to look at my Facebook posts, so on and so forth.

At the same time, you could potentially see that as another opportunity to connect with consumers and actually drive them back to your television or engage them deeper for your television, for example. Social provides a unique layer which can be a complement to other formats of media. When we run social and television together, we see two times the effectiveness. We can actually use social channels to increase reach of our core TV video product, in many cases.

So what we’re doing is we’re saying, Okay, this is now a media ecosystem that has to work together, and there are huge advantages to making them work together, with relatively painless shifts of budget — one tradeoff begets a larger impact on the other side. Maybe you’ve seen Oreo [cookies] during the Super Bowl in 2013. If you look at what we did there, it was traditional advertising tied with social amplification of our participation in that big game.

Or if you look at the work that we’re doing on Trident [gum], for example. We’re taking a core TV integration, and we’re adding a platform like Twitter. That core TV integration would have gotten us to 18% reach of our target demo, but adding Twitter gets us a 50% reach, and also allows us to take that core TV product and push that out to consumers while they’re not in front of the television. So, while they’re searching for video on their mobile device, while they’re closer to point of purchase, which is another key opportunity for these channels to work together, we begin to bring media closer to the point of buying. We can affect consumer behavior in a more direct way. Make sense?

What kind of an organizational challenge has it been at Mondelez, to develop this media ecosystem?

I work in an organization which is very forward-leaning. The biggest challenge has been finding all the resources and being able to prioritize, because everybody wants to do it.

But I think the challenges that continue to face organizations our size are, how do you get measurement alignment? So we spent a lot of time tracking ROI [return on investment], really looking at what are the levers that actually drive greater effectiveness in our communication. I think measurement is probably the biggest challenge that most organizations have right now.

Could you give us some insights into how you’ve addressed the measurement challenge?

I think most organizations are looking for very discrete understanding of “What did my Twitter feed deliver to my bottom line?”

What we’ve done is we flipped it on its head and said, Okay, the sensors aren’t sensitive enough to pick up that direct correlation because of Twitter, primarily because the spending is not at the same level. So instead, we look at how social amplifies the bigger pieces of the media ecosystem. What does Twitter do to TV? We see that when we use Twitter and TV together, that would actually increase television. And that’s something that’s big enough to be measured. So what we’re doing is we’re looking more at attribution modeling versus direct correlation of that one specific channel.

If on average CPGs [consumer packaged goods] are spending 70% on television, and you could make that 70% investment work twice as hard, that’s a pretty dramatic and significant impact to the bottom line.

So have you abandoned the ROI, a financial measure of social investments?

Well, let me be very clear: This is a financial measurement of social investment. But the difference is what we’re looking at in terms of how you track that financial measure. Having said that, we still have pretty significant ROI tracking around individual investment. So we have structured programs on brands like Nilla [wafers], where we only operate Facebook, in isolation of any other media. And we see that we can lift businesses and percent. We are looking at the discrete measurement as well.

But again, the greater opportunity is, how does Facebook amplify the reach of television? We did this with Cadbury Crème Egg in the UK. And that continues to drive further investment.

We are also looking directly at things like mobile, and targeting people geographically with geo-location, or based on behavior patterns, like looking at news in the morning. How do we begin to drive gum sales, by targeting people on their morning commutes? Or how do we begin to drive in-store sales by targeting people on their phones when they’re inside a store? We’re seeing dramatic lifts in both those scenarios.

You just began talking about the geospatial data and macro aggregation of social data. What is your broad perspective on that type of data, integrating that into your systems, and producing a lift for your media buys?

I definitely think that it will impact more broadly in our organization. I think it’s really early days of that. The necessary sophistication, in terms of being able to combine systems, we’re not 100% there yet. But we’re seeing a growth in interest and excitement around real-time bidding of video, and the bottom line is that every piece of media that we buy will be bought on an exchange very shortly. So television will be programmatically bought, it will be digitized. Anything that can be digitized will be digitized.

I think the broader perspective is that social data will be a driving force for organizations, both on the new social CRM in terms of timing to sales. In CPG companies, you’re going to see the immediate impact on the media-buying behaviors.

It starts with aggregating social data into the platforms that you can buy programmatically. How do I begin to use that data for better targeting? And then also, if you’re smart, how do I begin to create actions after customers buy the product, that bring them back to social, so I can begin to signal that I actually have some type of impact that they’re part of now, kind of my purchase ecosystem, right?

So, whether that is “pactivation,” as we talk about it — activating packaging — or whether that is food safes or any of those kinds of methods or incentives that actually get you to come back to a Facebook page or to Twitter and say you bought a product, or photograph yourself with a purchase. But the first piece of social data is, how do you begin to use it in targeting real-time buying.

But I think what you’re talking about is totally new systems. You’re talking about going from a very structured data world, a world where I have very structured data — yes, no, one, zero — to a world where you’re talking about analyzing consumer conversation as well as structured data like the Facebooks of the world.

To give you an example, here’s the work we did on Nilla Wafers, which has been talked about pretty frequently: We started off by looking at existing inside data, and we said, Okay, we want to understand the psychographic, demographic, geographic makeup of the Nilla buyer specifically. We were operating just on Facebook, so we knew that we could be very targeted. We had a community of only 18,000 people.

In the next six months, we bought our way to 330,000 people. There was some organic growth, too. But we used that insight data to continue to refine our purchases. What’s so nice about these targeted platforms is that I can buy, down to the individual, the person who is most likely to buy my brand. And that’s why we have been able to so effectively lift the purchase of a brand like that by almost 10% using social alone.

Can you talk more about how mobile ties into your strategy?

We’re a snacking company, it’s about impulse buying. And the device that you have with you throughout the entire consumer journey, and that can most likely trigger impulse buying, is the mobile phone. So we made a pretty, pretty aggressive commitment to moving 10% of our media into mobile, because we knew that it was not only something that was important, but something that we wanted to get really good at.

So, for instance, I think the channels that are most underutilized to date are packaging and POS [point of sale] display. I think what you’re going to see over the next few years is the digitization or the completion of the ecosystem around packaging and POS. There’s no reason why you pass by a piece of display of ours and it doesn’t ask you to take an action, even beyond just purchasing. I would much rather take a small percentage of the people who walk by that display and capture them in some type of mobile CRM platform that I have, because I know that that’s going to provide a lot of power and opportunity for me to continue the dialog, or continue to try to drive them to either loyalty or purchase.

I think the other thing you’re going to see is loyalty, especially in the CPG space. Again, this mobile device provides a platform for us to create loyalty above and beyond just store card type loyalty, but loyalty —whether it’s because we deliver content or value or utility, or because we drive you to different discounts — is really going to be cornerstone through the next few years.

Tell us about Mobile Futures.

We launched something called Mobile Futures to say, Okay, we want to win in this mobile space. We also know that the people who are winning in this mobile space are the startups, the companies that are building totally new businesses, that are thinking totally different than we will ever think. How do we invite them in, not just to look at their product, but also to help change our cultural mindset?

So we did an open call. We said, We have three areas we care about: social TV, mobile at retail and impulse buying. We asked for startups that fit into those core areas. And we received around 300 submissions. We had eight of our brands that agreed to participate in the program, and from the 300 submissions, we whittled it down to 22 who presented to the eight participating brands, and then from there we chose nine startups to pilot with.

The challenge was to actually concept and launch a pilot in 90 days, to operate at the speed of a startup. And our brand folks had to actually go and work for the startup for a week. That helped people to see how these cultures are totally different than our culture. Every single one of those employees who came back from that, they all said the same thing. First they said, “Should we go work for a startup?” And I said, “You should never do that, because if all of our best brand marketers quit, Bonin will be fired, and I kinda like what I’m doing right now.” I said, “But even more important, the lesson learned here is how do you take those cultural changes, that thinking, and apply it to a big organization that actually has more resources than a startup.”

We began to call those folks “intrapreneurs,” and we really focused on building this internal entrepreneurial culture. Every single one of those marketers are forever changed. They’re more willing to do cutting edge or leading edge projects. They feel more confident in their skill set. Even more importantly, they have a network of people they can call to help them think through new problems.

It was all about really getting that cultural aspect right, because culture eats strategy for lunch.

Could you give an example of one of those pilots?

So, Waze is one of the pilots. Waze eventually got bought for a billion dollars by Google. Actually, the only person I apologized to for saying not to go work for a startup was Kathryn Scheaffer, since she probably would have made a lot more money had she been there when they got bought for a billion. I owe her my deepest apologies—

— loyalty has its costs.

Yeah, exactly. Let’s not bring it up ever again. But, so what we did there was, Waze is a social navigation application, has 40 million users. Basically people plug in where there’s traffic and where there’s not traffic, to help navigate the simplest way to a destination.

Waze was flirting with advertising, so we worked with them and a partner, Come and Go, and QuickCheck, and as you pass the Come and Go or QuickCheck store, we would target you with an ad. And we did a bunch of different types of ads. One, it would be a little — it wasn’t a popup ad, it’s little icons that show up on your GPS — one would be an icon of the store. When you want to see, you click on the icon of the store, and there we offer you a deal. Buy a Coca-Cola and a pack of gum. Or another one was just the gum logo, little box. That drove a 10% lift in convenience stores where we tested that pilot.

Another one pilot was with an application called Endorse. Endorse no longer is around, but we found another startup that looks just like Endorse, called Checkout 51, which we’re rolling out with now across all of North America. What that app does is it provides cash back to consumers for purchasing specific items. Instead of having to go through a loyalty card or any sort of kind of complications, all you do is you do your regular shopping, and then when you get home, you take a photograph of the receipt, and then it validates and shows your savings; once your balance reaches $20, you can have a check mailed to you.

We partnered that with our NCAA activation in-store, and we created a bracketed approach. So if you buy and scan Wheat Thins on week one of the brackets, and in week two you get Ritz, then week three you get Oreo, week four you get Nilla. And when you start to begin to think about it — and when I talk about this I usually show a chart that shows the arrows from where a person started in the funnel, and then where they went after that — all of a sudden, you begin to then build really complex loyalty programs in ways that we’ve never been able to build before.

So, I can drive you to one product to the next by putting my lead product at the end, or if I have new product development, NPD, I can put that in the middle and drive purchase around that, again, with my lead product as a driver towards the end of that loyalty scheme, right? And it doesn’t have to be over a week period of time. It could be any store. It could be, buy all four of these, it unlocks, unlocks, unlocks. It is an escalating kind of loyalty and purchase.

The other amazing thing about that is they provide us basket-level data. So now, we might get data back from our amazing retailers, but we don’t get the basket-level data, so we don’t know what else is part of that shop. We do spot surveys and checks, those kinds of things, but this is real data. The lesson learned from the folks that partnered on Endorse is the digitization of the in-store process, and the potential power that will be unlocked with these tools: loyalty, real data about what the real purchase consumer is. So, huge, which is why we’re rolling out with a partner that looks like that, across all of North America.

Is it accurate to say that the processes you have around customer engagement are being transformed by social tools?

Of course. The whole world is getting transformed by social tools, right? Your life is transformed by social tools. You live on Facebook as much as you live anywhere else now. I think most people understand the transformation it has in their personal life. But the moment they enter the walls of organizations, for some reason they forget it. And they go back to what is comfortable, what they’ve done forever, and they forget to push into where this world can go.

The issue is how do you build cultures and encourage mindsets to think different, and not fall back on what you’re used to. It’s not a data game. I think most people would tell you, Oh, the data, the measurement’s not there. Well, first of all, if you allow the biggest transformation in consumer engagement that maybe we’ll see in our entire lifetime to stop — and you don’t allow yourself to participate in that because of measurement, and you’re not forcing the hand of people who are measuring this for you, to make sure that they figure out how to measure it, then — I mean, why even show up to work?

So, whenever I hear the measurement argument, I get so frustrated, because it’s like, are you kidding me? Force us to be able to measure, figure out how to measure. The opportunity is too big in front of us. Hence, the reason why we’ve been laser-focused on that.