Helping A Restaurant Brand To Revitalize Their Out-Of-Home Creative

The Challenge

A marketing agency was working with a restaurant brand to revitalize their out-of-home creative. A couple years prior, the brand had updated its distinctive brand elements, shifting the color scheme of its out-of-home billboards as well as updating its logo and fonts. The concern within the organization was that these changes could be negatively impacting traffic declines and brand association.

Why Hotspex?

Out-of-home communications were the biggest part of the brand’s marketing program and it was crucial that the new, refreshed designs were evaluated to uncover any potential optimizations. Hotspex is an insights firm who specializes in ensuring that a brand’s creative is recognizable, relevant and drives traffic. By leveraging our Quick Ad Test Tool, Hotspex was able to deliver fast results that provided insight into what was working and what was not working for the brand’s creative in a structured, cohesive framework.

The Setup

The business objective was to develop creative that is recognizable, relevant and ultimately drives traffic to the restaurant. Key Research Objectives:

• Identify which creative most effectively influences relevance and likelihood to visit, while maintaining brand recognition.
• Gain a richer understanding of each of the following and the impact on the ad’s effectivenes:

• The brand logo placement
• Food Imagery
• Font
• Color

Additionally, the brand had billboard extensions on approximately 80% of the boards. The current extensions had a 3-year life cycle and production cost $1 million amortized over three years. It was key to investigate if there was any brand equity with the extensions.

The Solution

To determine which ads met the benchmarks of success (i.e. breakthrough, memorability, branding, brand alignment, persuasion, & emotion), we designed an in-context experience that simulated a virtual driving experience and included oncoming traffic, competitive ads and specific timing sequences to ensure adequate exposure. Utilizing this experience and our Ad Test Tool, we were able to detect the performance versus benchmark/norms, diagnose the emotional strengths and weaknesses, and dissect the stimuli element by element.

Outcomes

Our Ad test tool successfully informed them on which elements of their creative was working and which elements needed to be optimized. Since this project, we’ve partnered with this agency to test over 60 communications and the agency has personally recommended us to another client of theirs.