Hasbro’s Early Ads for Prime Video Helps Attract New Customers

Brief description of the dive:

• According to a case study published by the e-commerce giant, Hasbro managed to build trust and attract new customers to its Peppa Pig and Play-Doh products thanks to advertising on Amazon Prime Video.
• The toy and entertainment marketer was an early adopter of Prime Video ads, which began rolling out earlier this year, running parent-targeted campaigns for Peppa Pig and Play-Doh in the U.K. and U.S., respectively. The creative on the streaming service was tied to searches and purchases on e-commerce marketplace Amazon.
• Hasbro saw a 21% increase in brand searches and an 18% increase in sales for Peppa Pig, while Play-Doh saw a 14% increase in ad recall and a 4% increase in brand favorability. In both cases, the brands were able to engage a large group of entirely new customers.

Diving Insight:

Case studies like Hasbro’s are valuable to Amazon because they encourage brands to allocate more resources to Prime Video. The introduction of ads to the streaming service is a key part of Amazon’s goal of realizing a full-funnel advertising platform, where branding and awareness tactics like TV campaigns can be closely tied to online sales, reducing the need to spend money on other channels. Amazon’s collection of first-party shopper data, or retail media data, is positioned to add an extra layer of precision to those campaigns.

Amazon’s growing advertising business still reaps the lion’s share of revenue from formats like sponsored product ads, which appear as people browse the company’s sprawling e-commerce marketplace. But the introduction of ads to Prime Video in January—a change that has caused consternation among users accustomed to an ad-free experience—showed that Amazon is betting more heavily on its upper-funnel marketing capabilities. Hasbro’s early adoption of Prime Video ads suggests that brands are finding success by taking full advantage of Amazon’s toolkit.

Peppa Pig’s UK campaign, which ran from February to March, tested three different creative messages to assess which would drive higher conversions, relying on Amazon’s first-party data to target households with young parents via a selection of brand-safe programmes. The effort reached 7 million unique viewers, and more than two-thirds (68%) of Peppa Pig purchases in the six-week campaign window came from shoppers who were unfamiliar with the brand.

Third-party analysis by Lucid confirmed improvements in Peppa Pig ad recall, brand awareness, purchase intent, and brand favorability. Hasbro executives also praised how Amazon’s low ad volume — the company promised a lighter ad load than competing streaming services — helped create a “relatively uncluttered space.”

“Prime Video has provided us with a highly unique reach and brought new customers into the purchasing funnel, which has allowed us to increase the effectiveness of our bottom-of-funnel efforts,” said Jennifer Burch, senior director of global media at Hasbro, in a statement accompanying the case study.

Positive results for Peppa Pig encouraged Hasbro to shift its strategy to the U.S. for Play-Doh. The children’s modeling clay attracted 7.2 million unique customers via Prime Video, most of whom were not affected by ads running during the same campaign. Seventy-nine percent of Play-Doh sales attributed to the Prime Video promotion came from new customers. Consumers exposed to a combination of video, display, and sponsored ads had a 6.4 percent higher purchase rate than those exposed to sponsored ads alone.