B2C Marketing: How Avocados from Mexico’s Super Bowl campaign got 2 billion interactions before the game even started

THE CUSTOMER

Avocados from Mexico is the marketing arm for two organizations — the exporters of Avocados from Mexico, that's a Mexican organization, and the importers of Avocados from Mexico, which is an American organization.

“These two organizations at some point about four years ago realized that they were marketing the same product, have the same common goals, but they were conducting separate branding efforts totally independent one from the other one,” said Ivonne Kinser, Director of Digital Marketing, Avocados from Mexico.

Since banding together in 2013, Avocados from Mexico has driven branding efforts in four different business segments — food service, food operators, supermarket units and general market consumers. This means that not only does it cater to consumers, but behemoths like Chipotle and Walmart as well.

CHALLENGE

When talking about Super Bowl advertising, Avocados from Mexico is a relatively small organization.

“If you compare marketing with even our marketing budget or resources with other companies with the Super Bowl ads like Procter & Gamble, Budweiser, Coca Cola, Pepsi, etc,” Kinser said, “we are pretty small. We're the underdog. We're a very small player playing in the same sandbox with the biggest brands in the industry.”

In the competitive digital landscape during the Super Bowl, the competition is over who can dominate that conversation, she added.

“We’re talking about billions of impressions … [the Super Bowl] is one of the most challenging social media spaces ever. When we go to that conversation with less resources, lower budget, we have to be very smart about the way we execute our strategies to make more out of resources,” she said.

The team is extremely focused on KPIs going into the Super Bowl campaign, according to Kinser.

“One of the objectives is to increase the reach of our Super Bowl spot because, as you can imagine, it's a big investment, especially for a brand like ours,” she said. “We leverage the digital platforms to amplify as much as possible the content of the Super Bowl spot, but also to increase the engagement.”

The other KPI, she said, is to dominate the conversation — or at least take a significant share of voice. Which is difficult because unlike any other campaign that the Avocados for Mexico team runs, they don’t know the competition.

“In a normal situation when you go to the market with a campaign, you kind of know what your competitors are doing and what direction they are going, more or less,” she said.

When planning for the Super Bowl, the team doesn’t know who the competition is, what their budget is, and they know nothing about what kind of campaign they’ll be running.

“The only way to succeed is just to do your best — know your weakness, know your strength, and just do the best you can possibly do and hope for the best,” she said.

Kinser gave the example that although Avocados from Mexico has the weakness of being a smaller brand with less resources, it gives the team the strength of being nimble and the ablility to “tweak and shift gears extremely fast.”

“We don't take our eyes away from the conversations, the metrics, the analytics tools, not even for one hour during the two weeks we have where we're running the Super Bowl campaign,” she said.

The team is consistently tweaking everything in the retail space, she added, based on where the conversation is going and how competitors are moving.

CAMPAIGN

Avocados from Mexico’s Super Bowl ad parodied a secret society, the members of which are concerned that their secrets are getting out — namely, that avocados have good fats and are healthy.

The video received over 3 million views on YouTube and used #AvoSecrets to drive conversation. If people went to the dedicated landing page, which was promoted leading up to and surrounding the event, they would find an interactive app.

The marketing team activated brand advocates via social media and email leading up to the game with the concept of this “found” phone of one of the secret society members. This encouraged people to interact and engage in the campaign, before they even fully knew what it was.

The anticipation of the full campaign led to 2 billion impressions before the game even started, with people interacting with the apps available on the found phone.

Step #1. Develop a digital story

Once the idea for the Super Bowl TV spot has been decided on and after rounds of testing with a brand agency, Kinser’s digital team and an agency begin concepting the digital extension of it. That happens around October or November, giving the team three or four months to plan and implement.

The digital platform had to be created from scratch with the objective not just to amplify the ad, but to be compelling on its own. The platform has its own story that will resonate with a digital audience.

When brainstorming what the digital platform will be, Kinser said, the team usually takes one element from the TV spot theme and brings it to life.

For example, in the final Super Bowl ad, there is one character who is livestreaming the secret society meeting with his mobile phone.

“The cellphone is what we took, and [we] started creating a whole new story around this specific theme,” she said.

The mock mobile device has different apps that mimic any typical smart phone, but each offers the user a new way to interact and unfold the story.    

“The difference is those are not apps; those are links. Each of these links just triggers that completely different experience,” she said.

For instance, if the user opens up the Instagram app, they will find three pictures — each hiding a message. By selecting the correct filter, the message is revealed.

Clicking on Snapchat will lead users to a page to follow the official Avocados from Mexico Snapchat, and clicking on Twitter invites them to share about the campaign and enter a sweepstakes.

“We offer to users the possibility to be part of our Super Bowl campaign in any way they want with any content format on any platform,” Kinser said.

Customers could browse the secret society member’s emails — containing some very sensitive information about Area 51 — texts, and even listen to voicemails.

If they wanted to listen to some music while browsing, there’s a carefully curated Spotify music playlist to listen to — if you really, really like avocados, that is.

“What we wanted to do is to create a story that maximizes the interaction of the consumers with our platform,” she said. “That's why we offer 19 different options for them to interact with our campaign in any way they want.”

Step #2. Utilize a sweepstakes to excite users

“Every year we integrate a sweepstakes,” Kinser said. “Anyone who shares using the hashtag was participating in the sweepstakes.”

There was one winner per week for five weeks leading up to the Super Bowl, with the sweepstakes ending two days later. The rules are listed as one of the apps on the phone, explaining that in order to enter, the user has to have a Twitter account.

By exploring the app and using the links provided, users post preset entry messages to their Twitter accounts using #AvoSecrets and are automatically entered. The entries were only good for that week, so the user had to keep coming back and interacting.

The Prizes app explained how to enter the sweepstakes and the different prizes — trips to Ibiza, Spain and French Polynesia — and prompted participation with a “Tweet and You Could Win” button.

Step #3. Keep the ‘big day’ conversation engaging and authentic  

“It’s a constant evolution,” Kinser said of the campaign, adding that fine-tuning is happening every moment leading up to Super Bowl Sunday.

For example, she said, in the last week leading up to the event, the team decided to invite a group of comedy writers, in addition to the creative team and copywriters, into the brand’s war room to help craft interactions in real time during the game.

Decisions like that are where the team can be nimble, she added, and she only has one person that needs to approve a decision like that.

“[The comedy writers] came at the last minute. It was a great success because all the interaction that we had with other brands and even with users, we have reports, tweets that users send to us … they were loving the conversation,” she said.

All that brain power in the room actively engaging in the conversation on Super Bowl Sunday was vital, she added.

“It’s not enough just to manufacture impressions or a one-sided conversation. What makes brands break through the clutter is the meaningful back and forth conversation with their audiences,” Kinser said.

While copywriters are close to the brand voice and community management, the comedy writers helped to optimize responses and conversations that were coming in at an extremely fast past, she said.

“We had … three different rooms — one room with people monitoring the analytic tools, another room with people crafting, approving and creating the graphics for the communication in real time, and then we had another one with comedy writers or copywriters from our agencies or creative directors crafting those messages,” she said.

The team’s goal is to interact with everyone who interacts with them, but in a meaningful and engaging way, she added.

“You need a lot of brainpower and a lot of talent behind it to be able to deploy something like that,” Kinser said. “We hired a group of comedy writers to complement our copywriting team for the real-time conversation.”

RESULTS

“This is not a one-size fits all kind of event. Every brand has to follow what is the personality of the brand, the style. Our consumers are very, very engaged with our brand,” Kinser said.

The goal of this campaign is unique, she added, because Avocados from Mexico has the love of consumers, and it doesn’t have to win them over.

“We have them; they love it. We have to contribute to that love with the same kind of engagement and interest. So, our emphasis was … how we can establish a meaningful communication?” she said.

Another unique facet for this brand is that most likely, the consumers actually have the product in front of them while watching the commercial — guacamole is a staple of the Super Bowl tradition.  

“When you have that situation,” she said, “you better make good use of that opportunity … this is a campaign where we're present in [viewers’] homes, and at the same time in front of them.”

With this campaign opening up those conversations, the team saw:

• 2 billion impressions before the game even started
• A spike of 10,000 mentions of #AvoSecrets in 15 minutes after the commercial aired
• 3.2 billion impressions overall

“I think the same thing that we learned, we learned it the first time we went through a Super Bowl campaign two years ago — there's no amount of traditional, digital media that has the power of the influencer marketing,” Kinser said.

Since learning that after the first Super Bowl campaign, the brand has been focused on strengthening influencer marketing, and “it's something that we're going to keep working on year-over-year and making it stronger,” she concluded.  

Creative Samples

1. Super Bowl ad
2. Mobile phone interface
3. Interactive apps
4. Instagram filters
5. Text message
6. Spotify playlist
7. Sweepstakes rules

Sources

Avocados from Mexico

Chirpify

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