Bonin Bough reveals 5 cheap digital campaigns that delivered huge returns for Mondelez

For a guy with access to one of the largest advertising budgets in the world, Bonin Bough specializes in doing it on the cheap.

As the VP of global media and consumer engagment for Mondelez International, Bough is responsible for overseeing the digital marketing efforts for some of the world most well known brands, including Oreo, Tang, Trident and Cadbury. Today at the ClickZ Live conference in San Francisco, Bough stressed the need for brands to reinvent the way they spend money on digital advertising. He encouraged marketers to embrace new technology and strategies that delivered big returns on small investments.

To highlight this, Bough revealed five successful digital strategies his team at Modelez had created on a budget.

Targeted Facebook ads

For Nilla wafers, Bough and his team decided they were going to direct the bulk of their budget towards Facebook marketing. The goal was to boost brand awareness and to get more people to join the online Facebook page for Nilla, which had about 18,000 fans. Bough said the team created a series of highly targeted Facebook ads that were shown to very specific demographics. The ads consisted of funny, uplifting messages coupled with old-timey pictures of women. The team then started measuring the performance of each ad, eventually promoting the ones which were getting the most shares and engagement within their specific demographic.

“We no longer have to pretend to look at a few pieces of creative and guess which one is the best,” said Bonin. “We have a real consumer feedback loop now.” Overall, Nilla invested $623,000 in the campaign and moved a $1.4 million business by 9%, a huge impact for a campaign that cost less than a million dollars, said Bonin. It also more than doubled its Facebook Page following.

Short video clips on Twitter

Instead of promoting entire clips of sponsored, Mondelez focused on taking short 6 second and 15 second clips of their video content and sharing it out on Twitter. In this way, it could target people at different times of the day, making that content have a longer lifespan. For example, it took this 70-minute long Wheat Thins sponsored segment on The Colbert Report and turned it into 22 short video clips, shared on its social media channels.”We realized we could use Twitter to create unique, unduplicated reach for our TV content,” said Bough.

Enlisted the help of Vine celebrities

For Trident gum, the marketing team leveraged the existing followings of several Vine celebrities, who could quickly turn around humorous and unique video clips based on the brand’s products. These clips were produced for a fraction of the cost of a large video ad, and in some cases were reaching even larger audiences. “Vine celebrities had huge audiences, some of the videos were reaching 4 million shares,” said Bough. “We were reaching audiences that were almost twice that of the premier of The Walking Dead,”

Here are a few of the Vines made by Vine celebrities Rudy Mancuso, Brittany Furlan and Nicolas Megalis:

Outsourced video commercials to the Tongal community

For longer video commercials, Mondelez once again outsourced the filmmaking, going to LA-based video making service Tongal. Tongal crowdsources ideas for video concepts from a community of filmmakers, who are then given the budget to create a commercial based on the winning idea. In this way, brands can tap into the artist community, getting high quality content for a much smaller budget than if they went to an agency.

Here’s a commercial for Chips Ahoy! created by a filmmaker from the Tongal community:

Created a branded mobile game app

Instead of going to one of Mondelez’s agencies, Bough approached a company called game developer called PikPok to create a free game featuring Oreos. The concept of the game was based on the eating ritual of “Twist, Lick and Dunk” for Oreo Cookies. While the game app was free to download, it featured ads for Oreos within the playing interface. Not only did “Twist, Lick, Dunk” become wildly popular, it also became the most successful branded game app of all time. It has over 5 million downloads, ranking number one overall in 12 countries and top ten overall in 36 countries. Push notifications from the app drove an extra 1507 hours of play during the Superbowl, giving it some serious ROI. As an added cherry, other brands started advertising within the Oreo app itself, making it a one of a kind media buy that actually became cash positive.

Here’s what the game looks like: