Nestlé Waters, the bottled water unit of food and beverage giant Nestlé, has found that using video recognition tools on social media can help quantify a valuable element of the return on investment (ROI) from its sponsorship expenditure.
Chris Hodorowski, social listening manager/Nestlé Waters North America, discussed this subject at the 2019 Digital Marketing World Forum North America.
More specifically, he pointed to the fact that Perrier, a Nestlé Waters brand, is a sponsor of the French Open tennis tournament that is held every year in Paris.
During this annual event, broadcasters upload numerous video clips of the on-court action to social channels like Twitter. In many instances, Perrier’s logo appears on chairs used by the players and umpires, and on other relevant court-side assets.
By using video recognition tools provided by Talkwalker, a social media monitoring and analytics provider, Nestlé Waters was able to start calculating the ROI from this sponsorship material.
“We know that we get a lot of earned media and earned impressions out of all the footage on ESPN, and all the different types of commercials,” said Hodorowski. (For more, read WARC's in-depth report: How Nestlé Waters uses social listening for engagement, problem-solving and sponsorship measurement.)
Given that these videos clips, and the surrounding text, will generally not mention Perrier by name, it can be “hard to quantify that type” of return on investment, he continued.
Video recognition tools, however, can detect Perrier’s logo on an umbrella or a beach towel as well as a chair – even if the insignia is inverted or backwards.
Thanks to this methodology, Nestlé Waters was able to identify some 2,375 videos on Twitter that featured the Perrier logo, even though they made no mention of the brand.
Said Hodorowski, “Without the video and image recognition, we would have been blind to this. That got 166,000 engagements on those videos, and then that earned us about 23 million impressions. That’s a conservative estimate.
“It took us a long time to get to that point to measure something. Before, it was just kind of a faith-based metric: you knew that you were getting millions of impressions, but you could never really quantify it and affirm that. Now we can.”
Sourced from WARC
