BLACK FOREST
Black Forest tested Reels-style ad creative in a mix of Instagram and Facebook placements against a campaign with its standard creative assets, and saw an 11.6-point statistically significant lift in ad recall with the Reels-style creative.
Black Forest offers a line of classic and organic gummy bears and fruit snacks with a focus on ingredients. Each gummy and fruit snack is made with real fruit juice and uses colors from natural sources. The company belongs to Ferrara’s portfolio of brands.
statistically significant lift in ad recall for Reels-style ad creative
statistically significant lift in unaided brand awareness for Reels-style ad creative
statistically significant lift in message association for Reels-style ad creative
statistically significant lift in ad recall for campaign with Reels-style plus standard ad creative
Black Forest wanted to reach new audiences and drive top of mind awareness and recall for Black Forest's “Made with Real Fruit Juice” brand messaging.
THE SOLUTION
Optimizing the ad creative
For Black Forest’s latest campaign, the team decided to test different ad creative to better understand what type works best at meeting campaign goals. So it ran a three-cell brand lift study to compare the performance of the brand’s standard product-focused creative, new Reels-style creative and a mix of the two across Meta placements:
- Cell 1: standard creative across Feed, Stories and Reels placements on Instagram and Facebook
- Cell 2: Reels-style creative (developed specifically with Reels in mind) across Feed, Stories and Reels placements on Instagram and Facebook
- Cell 3: a combination of standard creative plus Reels-style creative across Feed, Stories and Reels placements on Instagram and Facebook
Black Forest’s media agency, Mindshare, helped plan and implement the media campaign, and its creative agency, Day One Agency, developed the standard and Reels-specific creative assets for the campaign. Day One Agency followed Meta’s best practices to build the Reels-style ad creative by ensuring that the assets were: 1) fresh, entertaining and attention grabbing; 2) easy to understand with text overlay; 3) rewarding to watch and relatable for the intended audience.
The Reels-style creative was further differentiated from the usual product-focused assets by: featuring a person; using a storytelling angle; appearing as unvarnished user-generated content; and being built to fit a 9:16 aspect ratio while being compliant with Reels “safe zones” (how the creative fits on the screen).
Black Forest showed all ads to US adults aged 25–44, including millennial parents and those with an interest in gummy treats, health and wellness and healthy eating. The team also showed ads to a Custom Audience who had previously engaged with video ad content. The brand opted to use the Advantage+ campaign budget feature to automatically distribute the budget across the best-performing ad sets in real time.
Black Forest determined the results of its April 17–May 21, 2023 campaign using a Meta brand lift study, which revealed that the cell with the Reels-style creative across Reels, Feed and Stories outperformed the other two cells:
- 11.6-point statistically significant lift in ad recall for Reels-style creative
- 1.2-point statistically significant lift in unaided brand awareness for Reels-style creative
- 1.2-point statistically significant lift in message association for Reels-style creative
- 7.1 point statistically significant lift in ad recall for the campaign running Reels-style plus standard creative