Toy Brand Case Study

How one brand drove multichannel sales during the off-season.

By testing and optimizing ad creative and tactics, this digital birthday campaign enabled a sweet sales boost outside of the typical holiday season.

Objective

Inspire gift-giving moments outside the holidays.

A leading toy brand’s Shopper Insights team surveyed families during the COVID-19 pandemic and discovered that parents were willing to spend more on birthday gifts since other expenditures had decreased. From this insight, the toy brand sought to create a campaign to achieve three key objectives.

Drive

sales of toys outside of the holiday shopping season

Test

ad creative and messaging to see which performed best

Learn

valuable lessons for future media campaigns

Solution

Meet these gift-givers where they’re shopping: online.

Birthdays looked different that year, but families still wanted children to feel the love on their special day. To reach guests across digital platforms at scale, the toy company invested in a national media campaign—with a Roundel™ approach—that included search, display, and Pinterest ads.

Find the most effective birthday message.
Test seven different versions of birthday-themed creative that integrated different age segments of the brand’s toys.
Drive guests to the brand page, which featured popular toys for a variety of age groups.
Home in on uncovered insights, such as how the “New at Target” tag gave one creative version a slight edge over the others, indicating that guests may want to buy the newest toys as gifts.

Based on this four-step solution, the campaign reached 20 million purchasers during the campaign period of July through October. These included guests with kids ages 0-10 in the household and previous toy or birthday category purchasers since 2019.

Results

Creative thinking led to a sales boost worth celebrating.

Over the 84-day campaign, the toy brand saw its sales skyrocket. By leveraging first-party transactional and behavioral data from Roundel, the brand increased budget allocations based on which creative and platforms performed best.

Moreover, the toy brand got to understand how modern shoppers celebrated big moments and see the campaign result difference by tactic.

Google Search Ads: $21 total average ROAS
Pinterest Ads: $15 total average ROAS
Display Ads*: $12 total average ROAS
Display ads on the Target app outperformed desktop placements on Target.com
Pinterest outperformed ROAS by 70x ($27 ROAS) when targeting relevant broad keywords to gift-giving audiences

66M

impressions total from 7M guests reached

>10x

in media-influenced sales for every dollar

$19

ROAS for overall campaign

Conclusion

Connect with relevant shoppers to drive sales during your brand’s off-season.

By using media solutions from Roundel, this leading toy brand generated significant scale and reach among its ideal audiences.

Reach

Ensure your brand’s products are introduced to relevant audiences where they search and shop online before your competitors.

Optimize

Leverage Roundel as a one-stop shop for testing and learning across multiple platforms for insights that fuel future optimizations.

Measure

Prove ROAS by tying ad performance to actual in-store and online sales with Roundel’s closed-loop measurement.

Connect in a whole new way.

Let’s talk about your next multi-channel campaign.

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*Overall Target placements though Roundel managed service.