KFC Australia is embracing the possibilities of digital media and moving away from a wholly TV-led approach, according to a senior marketing executive at the brand.
Television advertising has worked well for the business during the 50 years it has been operating in Australia, but a change of internal leadership saw new options considered.
Building up to digital for KFC is part of a “spiral of increasing confidence”, according to Michael Forster, KFC’s group digital marketing manager, where each experiment gave the business a baseline and that could then be optimised on and extended out.
For KFC, this meant starting from areas the digital team understood or that would have a big business impact. One example is running 50 CRM tests in a week, utilising a team of graphic designers and data scientists. (For more, read WARC’s report: KFC Australia embraces the changing media mix.)
“It didn’t make us millions of dollars but we did gain a bit of confidence that we could do this and prove a measured outcome,” said Forster, speaking at the recent IAB Measure Up event in Sydney.
Ultimately, the metric that matters is sales, but getting through a sea of acronyms and jargon to measure the marketing efforts being made and their impact is no easy feat.
“We still have lots of conversations, including with (KFC’s) leadership group about how do I convert a TARP to a CPM back to an effective cost per reach point and how do I make all of my digital metrics work together?” said Willie Pang, CEO of Mediacom Australia, which is KFC’s long-time media partner.
The commitment to sales figures overrides any other metrics, Forster said, adding: “At a C-Suite level, it doesn’t matter if you’ve got a really compelling argument that fits within your silo, they just say, ‘I don’t know if I can believe this. I need to see a sales outcome that I can compare to something else’.”
Television advertising has worked well for the business during the 50 years it has been operating in Australia, but a change of internal leadership saw new options considered.
Building up to digital for KFC is part of a “spiral of increasing confidence”, according to Michael Forster, KFC’s group digital marketing manager, where each experiment gave the business a baseline and that could then be optimised on and extended out.
For KFC, this meant starting from areas the digital team understood or that would have a big business impact. One example is running 50 CRM tests in a week, utilising a team of graphic designers and data scientists. (For more, read WARC’s report: KFC Australia embraces the changing media mix.)
“It didn’t make us millions of dollars but we did gain a bit of confidence that we could do this and prove a measured outcome,” said Forster, speaking at the recent IAB Measure Up event in Sydney.
Ultimately, the metric that matters is sales, but getting through a sea of acronyms and jargon to measure the marketing efforts being made and their impact is no easy feat.
“We still have lots of conversations, including with (KFC’s) leadership group about how do I convert a TARP to a CPM back to an effective cost per reach point and how do I make all of my digital metrics work together?” said Willie Pang, CEO of Mediacom Australia, which is KFC’s long-time media partner.
The commitment to sales figures overrides any other metrics, Forster said, adding: “At a C-Suite level, it doesn’t matter if you’ve got a really compelling argument that fits within your silo, they just say, ‘I don’t know if I can believe this. I need to see a sales outcome that I can compare to something else’.”
Sourced from WARC
