BLACK FOREST

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:

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: