GENEVA: Nescafé is launching a global marketing campaign later this year in which Tumblr will play a vital part, following the instant coffee brand's early success with its move to focus on the platform in 2015.

Last autumn, the Nestlé-owned brand announced it was dumping its traditional websites in favour of Tumblr in order to build stronger relationships with consumers – especially millennials – and boost ecommerce sales.

Michael Chrisment, Nestlé's head of global integrated marketing, told The Drum that the brand had seen a 30% increase in average monthly traffic while time spent was up 20%.

One of the attractions of moving to Tumblr for Nescafé was that, as a blog platform, there were more opportunities for co-creation and tapping user-generated content.

"We've spent six months rolling out on Tumblr and now that we have a common base platform we can share more and scale the impact of leveraging user-generated content," said Chrisment.

E-commerce has yet to take off, but Chrisment reported that an additional $200,000 in sales had been generated via a 'buy now' button which links to third-party retailers.

"We have this idea of being the 'category captain'," he added. "In China a third of coffee is bought online and there is a boom in India and Africa. We can see that e-commerce will help us gain market share [in those territories]."

Taken together, the results so far have been enough to convince the brand to make Tumblr an integral part of its first global marketing campaign.

"We're looking to combine efforts towards big events and there will be one towards the end of the year when we're going to launch [our first] global activation," Chrisment announced.

Parent company Nestlé is among leading brand owners which no longer regard digital marketing as a distinct operation, preferring instead to see all marketing as digital and to invest accordingly.

"Digital acceleration is front and centre to everything we're doing from a personal-development standpoint and from a business-impact standpoint," Chris Padgett, head of Nestlé USA's Digital Center of Excellence, told an ANA conference last year.

Data sourced from The Drum; additional content by Warc staff