Independent agency, 20ten Creative, used GWI to deliver the perfect brand partnership to their FMCG client, improving campaign performance by 88%.

“If we put GWI as a source in our slides, people are going to trust what we’ve said.”

London-based full-service agency 20ten Creative work closely with a leading FMCG brand. Early in 2021, they were invited to solve a significant problem – how to find the best brand partners for upcoming on-pack promotions.

While exciting and full of opportunities, this request also came with some major challenges:

• The client wanted to partner with a brand significantly outside their existing market
• With over 100 million promotional SKUs (unique, scannable barcodes used to track product sales) to be printed on packaging, it wasn’t a decision the agency, or their client, could afford to get wrong
• How do you repeatedly and significantly ensure brands are right for partnerships when the products, objectives, and opportunities in question change with each brief?

The challenge

Unlocking new opportunities and creating lasting processes.

Partnerships are a fantastic way for brands to unlock new audiences, but they must have the right brand-product fit to appeal to both new and existing consumers and make them want to interact with on-pack promotions.

20ten turned to GWI’s platform for reliable insights - the same tool that helped them achieve rapid growth during the pandemic.

“GWI gets us out of so many tight spaces and delivers so much creativity and interest across our agency teams. For a small team, it’s genuinely cost-efficient too", says Richard Brookman, Lead Data Strategist at 20ten.

"The brand partnership evaluations we run are a great example of this. GWI offers us a lot of depth, validity, and an increasingly wide canvas for finding essential audience context, and when this is combined with the near-infinite versatility of our social listening tools, what you get is a huge capacity to unite brands and partners in a simple yet hugely evidence based way."

The action

Comparing cross-market audiences to find the right brand fit.

20ten’s initial partnership instinct was to position the FMCG product as the snack of choice for hungry gamers looking for something quick and tasty.

“When starting a research project, it's important to keep all options open as sometimes early analysis leads to the best outcomes, and at other times the best results start with an intuition.

Either way, any early signal is just a hypothesis that you must test with data before even considering a move forward.”

In theory, a gaming crossover would open new retail opportunities and bring the FMCG brand closer to a younger demographic. But the agency needed to be 100% sure this instinct feeling was right.

20ten used GWI to conduct rapid research into many cross-market entertainment categories - comparing audiences across gaming, books/literature, TV/streaming, and film and music.

“Looking at a category level brought GWI to the fore, as we could explore people in the UK who had declared an interest in any entertainment category.”

To identify which category best aligned with the interests of their client, as well as a leading supermarket chain, 20ten focused on 4 key criteria.

The agency then used social listening tools to cross-reference category suitability, exploring consumer sentiment to get the full scope of potential audiences.

Following this process, they could ensure any option that featured in their proposal represented an extremely valid and significant way to progress.

“You couldn’t rely on social listening in complete isolation to make the assessment we made. You need something with the reputation and people understanding like GWI to build evidence and trust.”

The research proved 20ten’s instincts were right: Gaming was the best overall category fit.

Here’s a taste of the insights they uncovered about gamers.

After unlocking the best category, the same rigor went into revealing the perfect gaming franchises to align with.

20ten identified 6 key opportunities, but there was a clear frontrunner who succeeded across all key areas of analysis.

It was most talked about within their sample, with an estimated UK reach of 647M (a whopping 149% above average), the most tightly aligned with the FMCG brand audience, and had very high positive social conversation and history.

Backed by reliable, trustworthy data, 20ten had everything they needed to nail their proposal - presenting a realistic (and highly lucrative) partnership opportunity to their client.

The result

Driving campaign performance by 88%.

20ten Creative presented a partnership with a range of leading global gaming brands; all of which had survived the scrutiny of their new process.

The client went with their lead recommendation – an opportunity that was then consolidated by their internal talent & partnerships team to drive the full activation.

Since activating this campaign late in 2021, here are a few of the biggest wins to date:

• Increased retailer distribution by over 300 - i.e. the number of stores selling the FMCG product with promotional activation SKUs
• 88% uplift in campaign performance - versus the previous campaign, with Trend Hunter grading the brand partnership 8.2/10
• All-time highest earned social media reach for the FMCG client - and this figure continues to rise

Overall, this process was a huge win for both the FMCG brand and 20ten. They got a brand partner that dwarfed their initial option in scale by 30x; 20ten was able to execute an efficient process that set up their creative team for success and, critically, the resulting campaign has been extremely effective and popular.

“From creating little internal ways of working improvements, to obviously all the classic agency strategic work we do, GWI is extremely useful for building a case for why we've taken a particular approach, and allowing us to build a beautiful data story.”

GWI is now firmly embedded in the agency’s work. From campaign planning to pitching, from production to processes, it’s the fastest way for 20ten’s in-house teams to investigate client audiences and get answers to the big questions.

“Any agency, large or small, independent or network, would be crazy not to use GWI.”

“We couldn't employ someone to solve those problems any better than the GWI does,” Richard says. “It has made the idea of renewing our subscription an automatic one.”