ADA Philippines initiates #AnchorButterDaysAhead to successfully turn butter into a trend

This post is sponsored by ADA Philippines.

ADA Philippines won three awards at Marketing Excellence Awards 2022 Philippines: a silver in Excellence in Brand Strategy; and a bronze each in Excellence in Social Media, and Mobile Marketing, at New Coast Hotel Manila, Philippines, on 1 December 2022.

All three trophies were awarded for the same campaign – #AnchorButterDaysAhead – a campaign aimed to introduce Anchor Butter to a young Filipino audience.

Because of an over saturation in the market, Anchor Butter’s relevance and recall started to plunge. Without any major ad campaign, the brand wanted to reconnect with its younger audience.

ADA Philippines tapped into TikTok and kick-started a campaign, where influencers were invited to cook up their favourite recipes using Anchor Butter. Once the campaign gained momentum, they invited their followers to join the bandwagon and upload content using the #AnchorButterDaysAhead hashtag.

The campaign went viral within three days. Anchor Butter successfully reconnected with a young Filipino audience, started a trend, and made itself a must-have ingredient in the kitchen.

Coming together

The campaign turned out to be a success because of close collaborations and an alignment of goals between several parties within ADA, who were geographically distant and different, and had never worked together on the same project.

“Even though the various teams within ADA are geographically far, we were able to tackle the campaign as one synchronised team,” said Leandro Ignacio, digital marketing manager of Fonterra SEA.

This was the first cross-market collaboration between ADA Philippines, Fonterra, and ADA’s newly formed Content House at Iloilo.

“We had close communication and constant alignment to make sure everyone involved was clear on the objectives for our client. Our task was to deliver an impactful campaign, something ADA, Content House, and the clients could be proud of,” said country director of ADA Philippines, Mayi Baviera.

“Since the acquisition of Content House, ADA Philippines has been seeking opportunities to connect the two offices within the market.”

Our differentiating factor

While some agencies employ influencers, use a hashtag challenge or utilise user-generated content to amplify a campaign, ADA Philippines’ advantage in the market is its specialised roles such as data engineers and scientists, technologists, media experts, and more.

“In other agencies, the job functions are rather homogeneous. At ADA, not only are we able to practice different expertise, but we are able to provide insights from people coming from different backgrounds,” Baviera said.

“If the client already has something in mind, we can augment that with something more, go the extra mile rather than just answering the campaign objectives. We provide solutions to answer their business objectives that contribute directly to their bottom line.”

Added Ignacio: “The successful campaign done by the Philippines Anchor Butter team and ADA is now used as a best-in-class execution for Fonterra SEA!”

The right strategy

Choosing the right platform for its client also contributed to the success of this campaign. Armed with data, ADA successfully addressed the client’s brief to introduce Anchor Butter to a younger audience with the use of TikTok.

In the Philippines, there are about 47.5 million monthly TikTok users, with 80.4% of them aged between 18 to 34, spending an average of 80 minutes daily on the app.

The campaign received more than 418,000 page views, along with 454,000 engagements within the first three days of the launch. This also resulted in an 11% increase in sales versus the previous year.

This achievement is a recognition for ADA in the Philippines, a celebration of partnerships between ADA with its clients – working and winning together – and delivering tangible business outcomes for its clients.

Deepening client relationships

These inaugural recognitions from Marketing Excellence Awards 2022 are a start of bigger and better initiatives, and partnerships for ADA Philippines.

The team has extensive plans for the brands they manage, and intends to attain more awards in highlighting the strengths of its business as well as its clients’ successes.

“Winning together is what makes the victory sweeter and more meaningful,” Baviera said.

ADA Philippines is planning to invest its resources in strategic planning and automation, maximising its partners’ investments with them.

“We want our clients to focus on the value ADA brings with the suite of services we have.”

Apart from engaging with new clients, ADA would like to deepen relationships with its existing client base.

Automation as one of the marketing solutions

With the growing demand for more creatives to be produced faster, this is a good time for brands to invest in automation. It allows businesses to create more quality content in a shorter time frame, reducing man-hours for strategic tasks.

As advertising has been very notorious for long working hours, it is ADA’s plan to make a change and shift the focus to automation – to develop an automation-maturity level for its clients, agency partners, and industry players.

“By enabling agencies with automation, clients will be able to propel their businesses by maximising the use of data and tech, delivering growing market needs to individuals,” Baviera said.

In fact, results have also proven that the implementation of automation is able to improve the customer experience, reduce costs, and generate revenue.

Operating across 10 markets in South and Southeast Asia, including the Philippines, ADA is an integrated growth agency that provides a number of services; enabling enterprises and brands to drive top-line growth through digital marketing and sales transformation across Asia via three data-driven service segments: marketing, eCommerce, and customer engagement solutions.