How associating with Disney+ Hotstar delivers stronger awareness for FMCG brands

In an offline FMCG business, consumers’ purchase paths are quite simple – they walk into kirana stores, compare different products, ask the shopkeeper for recommendations, and pay for their purchases. Focusing on these tangible touchpoints pays rich dividends like customer retention and brand loyalty.

However,  the digital world is changing the way consumers purchase products. E-commerce has facilitated a greater buying convenience and ease of discovering new brands. A BCG report from May 2020 mentions that 40% of consumers conduct their own online research before making a purchase. This research-oriented buyer behaviour, spanning multiple touchpoints, has complicated purchase journeys.

Driving FMCG purchases through stronger branding

Consumer journeys for FMCG goods are either impulsive (e.g. for snacks, confectioneries, etc.) or planned (e.g. for groceries, personal care products, etc). Whether planned or an impulsive one, the path to the purchase begins with brand recall. Strengthening the brand and attribute awareness is a crucial step in an FMCG brand’s discovery phase.

Branding assumes an important role not just from the point of view of purchase journeys but also from the consideration of brand types – be it niche or mass brands. Niche brands enjoy the position of fewer competitors but need to educate customers about their products. On the other hand, a mass or established brand faces the challenge of maintaining a sustained presence within its customers’ consideration set. Thus, for both – niche and mass brands – it’s branding that emerges as a key equity and business driver making it core to meeting their business objectives.

Opting for OTT 

A FICCI-EY report highlights the recent surge in the number of OTT subscribers in India – from 10.5 million in 2019 to 28 million in 2020. This increased presence of users has led FMCG brands to consider the OTT space as the most suitable medium to reach transacting consumers.

With the fast-growing consumption of online entertainment and the wide canvas it provides for brand building both from an audience reach as well as ad formats point of view, Disney+ Hotstar is an efficacious platform for FMCG brands to reach their consumers effectively. Disney+ Hotstar’s ability to connect brands with an affluent, consuming class, assures greater brand visibility with a highly engaged audience that matters.

Meeting marketing objectives with Disney+ Hotstar

Besides a massive reach and sharp targeting options, an interesting facet of Disney+ Hotstar’s product suite which brands should utilise is its rich suite of innovative ad formats.

Here is a brief look at its wide range of ad formats, suitable for different marketing objectives:

• Providing uninterrupted storytelling to build brand propositions and narratives, at scale: Brands can narrate their story in full, by leveraging 60-180 second long-form ads. The ads that run on this format are skippable after 60 seconds (which is the average length of an ad-pod on Disney+ Hotstar). These leave the user with an uninterrupted experience while simultaneously creating a longer window for brands to hook the consumer to their content and brand narrative – e.g. Colgate Palmolive, which used long-form ads to achieve an exponential 1.8x uplift in online awareness on the back of an engaging message they brought alive on a 90-second creative.

• Launching products and announcing sales: Billboards are static or video displays that help brands build impactful awareness campaigns. E.g. Myntra successfully used the high-impact billboard strategy to garner a 14% increase in purchase intent for its End of Reason Sale (EORS) campaign.

• Driving brand salience: Mid-rolls and pre-rolls are 5-30 second ads that drive brand salience among highly engaged audiences thanks to their array of targeting options. Eg. iD Fresh achieved a significantly greater ROI – 10-15 million impressions for each campaign – with Disney+ Hotstar.

• Getting an incremental audience: Always-on displays are static, and typically leveraged to build a continuous, incremental reach among the target audience. For example, Healthmug seamlessly utilised always-on displays to gain an incremental audience through strong brand awareness.

Disney+ Hotstar also offers a host of branded content solutions via its specialised content division ‘Brand Lab’. It spans a variety of content marketing solutions such as:

• Influencer marketing: The Disney+ Hotstar team can help brands unleash the power of well-known influencers to span the entire gamut of brand objectives from awareness creation to relevance building and driving brand trials. For instance, Grofers received a 10% boost on higher consideration for its Grand Orange Bag Days sale by integrating its campaign content with the protagonists of Disney+ Hotstar’s leading shows – Yeh Rishta Kya Kehlata Hai and Mayur Pankhi. 
• Bespoke content: Deliver relevant, custom-branded content within Disney+ Hotstar’s brand-safe environment.
• Associative marketing: Associate with high impact properties to drive impact association for your brand.

Considering how readily consumers have taken to OTT media, FMCG brands have accepted the importance of utilising this space to address their marketing objectives. The presence of an affluent audience on Disney+ Hotstar along with its innovative ad formats makes it even more worthwhile for FMCG brands to leverage this relatively underutilised space.

1. Turn the Tide: Unlock the new consumer path to purchase: May 2020 by BCG