By Jennifer Vargas, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Amazon Ads
Milk-Bone knows a little something about dogs. Founded in 1908, the legacy pet-food company has produced a variety of biscuits, chews, and treats for generations of dogs. At the same time, the brand has sought to celebrate the authentic love between dogs and their human companions, as encapsulated in its tagline “More Dog.”
In 2018, Milk-Bone began working with Amazon Ads as a way to build brand awareness and increase sales, setting up a Store on Amazon and running streaming video and audio ads. As consumer habits continue to evolve, the brand looked to introduce innovative, creative ways to reach shoppers and inspire consideration. Milk-Bone saw Alexa as a way to evolve its “More Dog” campaign for modern consumers in the connected home.
In collaboration with Amazon Ads, Milk-Bone developed a distinctive, delightful campaign in 2022 that leveraged the power of Alexa for interactive audio ads and brand experiences. This activation came to life across ad-supported content on Amazon Streaming TV and audio, and helped drive new-to-brand and consideration growth for the brand.
Here’s how Milk-Bone brought this creative campaign to life.
Building an interactive Alexa shopping experience
Milk-Bone worked with Amazon Ads to create an immersive audio campaign, as a way to transform traditionally passive listening into opportunities for consumers to take action. To complement their Amazon Ads Streaming TV media, Milk-Bone ran interactive audio ads, a format that allows consumers to interact with relevant brands right in the moment on ad-supported audio content just by using their voice.
Through this campaign, when a customer heard a Milk-Bone interactive audio ad while listening to music on the Amazon Music ad-supported tier, they could simply say, “Alexa, add to cart” to their Alexa-enabled device. In doing so, the customer could easily add the Milk-Bone Dipped dog-biscuit product directly to their Amazon shopping cart—without ever leaving the streaming content they were enjoying.
Milk-Bone’s interactive audio ad that ran on the Amazon Music ad-supported tier on Alexa-enabled devices
Engaging customers in a fun, customized way
In addition to driving purchases, Milk-Bone also wanted to create ways for the connected home audience to engage more deeply with the brand. To do so, Milk-Bone produced interactive branded experiences with Alexa. These ad experiences are discoverable through Amazon ad-supported streaming content on any Alexa-enabled device, including Echo and Fire TV devices. Distinct from interactive audio ads, branded experiences with Alexa help audiences discover exclusive brand content through voice, screen-tap, or remote control in a more tailored way.
As part of the campaign, customers, after hearing or seeing a Milk-Bone brand message across ad-supported streaming video or audio content, could interact with the experience by either saying, “Alexa, more dog,” to their Echo device or using their remote control on their Fire TV.
Once the experience launched, customers were able to engage with a variety of activities, including quizzes testing a customer’s knowledge of dog breeds, finding pet nicknames inspired by the Milk-Bone brand, getting details about their dog’s astrology by saying “woof,” and lots more. After customers completed their interaction with the branded experiences, they were able to opt in to receive emails for more information about Milk-Bone.
“With interactive audio ads and branded experiences with Alexa, we are reimagining what audio ads can do for listeners and advertisers’ alike. We turn standard ad creatives into engaging opportunities, where brands can naturally integrate their brand messaging to delight and captivate listeners,” said Albert Hong, a principal product manager of audio experiences at Amazon Ads. “Customers can easily interact with these ad experiences just by asking Alexa. And as we see in the case of Milk-Bone, this simplicity is something customers look for, and it’s showing positive performance results for brands as well.”
Milk-Bone’s “Alexa, more dog” branded experience with Alexa that ran on Amazon ad-supported streaming content on Alexa-enabled devices
Growing new-to-brand and consideration
By using Alexa interactive audio ads solutions, the campaign delivered positive results for Milk-Bone. According to Amazon internal insights, the interactive audio ads and branded experiences produced over 20 million impressions,1 and yielded a new-to-brand rate of 31% among customers who asked Alexa to add Milk-Bone products to their cart—outperforming the category benchmark rate by 1.4x.2 This demonstrates that the enhanced voice experience had an impact on Amazon shoppers’ purchase consideration.
Additionally, over 11K consumers engaged with Milk-Bone’s branded experiences with Alexa, with 86% of sessions lasting more than 30 seconds.2 A Kantar Brand Lift study conducted for the overall campaign showed that it delivered 1.7x higher brand consideration versus industry benchmarks.3 This indicates that creating immersive Alexa interactive audio ad experiences provided valuable opportunities for Milk-Bone to reach new customers and foster brand loyalty.
“Amazon plays an integral role in our everyday lives, and Alexa has become an incredible resource for pet parents,” said Jasen Cusick, director of marketing for the dog-treats portfolio at Milk-Bone. “Creating a unique, interactive ad experience with Amazon Ads was the perfect way for consumers to experience Milk-Bone in a new, immersive way.”
With immersive ad experiences for brand marketing, performance, and everything in between, learn more about how Amazon Ads can help you reach engaged audiences.
About the author
Jennifer Vargas is a senior product marketing manager at Amazon Ads, where she focuses on go-to-market strategies across Twitch, audio, podcasts, and Alexa interactive ads product suite.
Sources
- Amazon Marketing Cloud, US, 2022
- Amazon internal data, US, 2022
- Kantar Brand Lift, US, 2022
