The pet ownership category is a broad and saturated market, with many brands widely available at a competitive price point. Natural premium pet food supplier Lily’s Kitchen wanted to increase brand awareness with a view to increasing its addressable audience before its key D2C online retail event, Black Friday.

One of the most exciting parts of the challenge was the desire to run this campaign without the use of media pixels which help inform targeting, bidding and measurement of the campaigns.

At a time when new ways of measuring effective campaigns is a core challenge for the industry, this offered a fantastic opportunity to get creative and explore – bringing together the best of brand building tactics with the future of successful performance measurement.

To boost brand awareness and reach Lily’s Kitchen’s target audience, we proposed a fully integrated media campaign that is grounded in data across online video, display, audio, and CTV.

With the absence of media pixels we used trusted cookieless data sets to understand demographics (age, gender, income and family status) and pet ownership across the UK, compared to the national average and target over indexing households to find our audience at scale without the use of cookies.

But with no pixels on site, we couldn’t optimise the media towards an on site action or conversion point, so we hypothesised that with impactful creative, we could optimise towards attention (attentive seconds per 1,000 impressions). We used attention as a proxy for performance and used this as the primary goal, optimising our campaigns towards this.

Leveraging TGI, we conducted rigorous audience planning to drill down into Lily’s Kitchen’s target audience. We looked at the audience demographics, media consumption and behavioural patterns to ensure we used the right messages and visuals to engage the right target audience. This research ultimately informed the media laydown and creative strategy to reach this audience.

Drilling down further, our research found that these audiences over-indexed for digital channels, particularly audio and streaming TV, and were more likely to read online news and lifestyle publications. As a result, we planned our budget across programmatic DSPs, digital audio (Spotify), CTV and Netflix.

• Multiple formats were used across Spotify to build frequency for greater effectiveness
• In-banner video units which use the same streaming technology as Netflix to deliver video content in the ad, reducing the file size to allow for less carbon emissions – key to Lily’s Kitchen’s ethical credentials as a B Corp – optimised towards attention
• Interactive display and video units optimised to maximise attention with several interactive elements, additional branding and Lily’s Kitchen’s trademark colour palette all being underpinned with Scope3 Carbon footprint measurement
• CTV/Netflix 30s non-skippable ads to aid rich storytelling across the creative pillars

We mapped investment in line with seasonal market trends, priming the audience before the busy retail period Black Friday so that Lily’s Kitchen could be found at the optimum moment. Based on our audiences’ personal traits and aspirations, we defined the core creative pillars for the campaign. These became the base for the entire activation in line with Lily’s Kitchen’s key brand slogan, “proper food for pets”.

We used publisher first-party data to reach our core pet owner audiences, as well as contextual targeting alongside pet related content. We hosted a creative workshop with the client and key media partners and delivered a suite of eight interactive display and video units.

Using Spotify’s unique first-party data set, we were able to better understand our audience through their listening habits and playlists and produce four audio creatives and supplementary display assets to run across their audio inventory.

We also produced a series of videos for activation across Netflix, CTV, In banner video and online video channels.

Attention optimisation was key for both media and creatives, using this as the primary measure of performance we were able to see significant performance lifts across the funnel, translating into strong year on year growth.