For Mercado Libre, carrying out studies and measurements is an everyday thing. Olga Algarra, media manager of the marketplace in Mexico, acknowledges that they analyze the behavior of electronic commerce in the country, what moves people to buy and, of course, what is the perception that Mexicans have of the brand.
But knowing what the competition is doing and how it is communicating its messages to the different audiences does not escape this, since how they perceive Mercado Libre depends a lot on it and if the yellow marketplace is at the top of people’s minds.
“We are market leaders in both orders and visits, but we have a perception of the brand that is far below that of our number one competitor: Amazon,” he reveals. Although in the fight for consumer love and preference they also consider Liverpool and Walmart, whose efforts in omnichannel are vast.
What they specifically detected is that Mexicans were not perceiving them as “a close brand.” Although Mercado Libre is of Argentine origin, says Algarra, it promotes and prioritizes local commerce, being one of the differences it has with Amazon.
With these barriers detected, MercadoLibre wanted to reinforce its positioning and brand presence among the Mexican public and to achieve this, it developed in six months and with the help of the GUT agency the campaign “Mexico on the skin”, in which articles made in the different states of the Republic and bought by Mexicans, while the song that bears the same name of the initiative and is performed by Luis Miguel is heard in the background.
The marketplace aired the ads for this crossmedia campaign on television, social media including Pinterest and TikTok, as well as Spotify. Algarra details that they made differentiated communications for generation Z and it is the campaign to which they have bet the most, with an investment of more than 120 million pesos, of which 54% was for digital and 46% for offline and was executed from February 14 to May 28 this year.
However, the questions arose: How to find out what each medium contributes to the advertising strategy? What duplicities were produced when the audience was exposed to the campaign? But drawing conclusions to optimize the budget of the marketplace seemed like a difficult task.
campaign optimization
Given this situation, Mercado Libre selected the Audio Matching technology from Netquest and Fluzo to measure, from a single source panel, the information that would improve campaign planning.
This made it possible to capture the audiovisual context of consumers through their smartphone without interrupting or disturbing them in their daily activities, in addition to detecting coincidences with advertising or content, which made it possible to faithfully collect the real exposure of the campaign in each medium. used.
All advertisers in the world have the same problem: how much coverage does the investment in television or digital or radio add, says Diego Semprun, chief revenue & operations officer of Fluzo. But with the right tool, you can understand the performance of advertising actions.
In the case of Mercado Libre, the variation in navigation to its website was measured, as well as that of its competition, with the aim of better adjusting advertising investment and making decisions in the future and in subsequent campaigns.
“All advertisers consider the decision of how to allocate their budget and the problem is that not all media reach the same audiences in the same way and with the same efficiency. However, until now the possibilities to find out were very limited”, he comments.
María García, head of marketing & communications at Netquest, reiterates that a peculiarity of this project is that with the online panel they were able to measure the exposure that a group of people had to the campaign, how many times they were impacted, what was the frequency, in addition to carry out recall surveys, dividing the exposed as well as the unexposed.
“The richness of this exercise is that it allows us, within the same group of people, to measure the activity, exposure and frequency, which in the world of data we know as observed data, but we can combine them with other declared data, which they are the ones we obtained from the survey”, explains García.
The results obtained
After optimization and measurement, the campaign achieved total coverage among the Mexican Internet user population, with TV being the predominant medium with 100% coverage. Online video also stands out, reaching two out of every three Mexicans (63.95%), while the other digital media received more modest coverage (Spotify 1.68%, social networks .06% and YouTube .58%).
TV Azteca 1 (55.31%) and Azteca 7 (52.64%) are the television channels that generated the most coverage for the campaign, followed by Las Estrellas Channel 2 (43.58%), Channel 5 (28.61%) and Channel 9 (5.4%). ). The rest of the channels in the pay system (with a lower investment and volume of viewers) achieved lower coverage. In total, the initiative was on 25 channels.
Digital channels reached 73% combined coverage. The campaign reached a total frequency of 13 hits per person mixing the different media. Close to 50% of the incremental coverage of digital on television occurred in the mornings, where there is less consumption of the small screen.
The impact among those exposed improved the memory of the brand in ‘Total mentions’ and in Suggested (base of the funnel). This data is relevant, since a greater number of regular customers was found among those not exposed. Recall of creativity is also significantly better among those exposed, both on television and digitally.
In the spontaneous memory of the campaign, six percentage points were gained, two points higher than in the case of double hits. In the memory of the brand, on the other hand, the jump was 13 points. Those not exposed remembered the brand in 56% and those exposed in 69%.
“This campaign was very relevant for us because we really saw that the needle moved, not only in the Fluzo and Netquest panel. Every month we have a measurement of Kantar, one of the pillars is top of mind , and we saw the movement of a point. Another measure is spontaneous recall, where in three months we were in first place, while the purchase consideration pillar moved one or two points. It doesn’t seem like much, but it is because we’re a monster and because our closest competitor is too. We are always fighting, although they are almost always winning”, concludes Algarra.
