Roundel™ Solutions Case Study

By testing and optimizing ad creative and tactics, this digital birthday campaign enabled a sweet sales boost outside of the typical holiday season.
Objective
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 decreased. From this insight, the toy brand sought to create a campaign to achieve its 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
Campaign Approach
Meet gift-givers
where they’re shopping now: online.
Birthdays looked different last 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.
Birthday toys search campaign
Duration: July 12, 2020–October 3, 2020
20 million purchasers:
- Guests with kids ages 0-10 in the household
- Previous toy or birthday category purchasers since 2019

Each ad drove guests to this brand page, which featured popular toys from iconic toy brands for a variety of age groups.


Guests spent an average 1:22 minutes on the brand page,
which indicates guests explored the assortment of toys on this page.
Creative Brief
Using cheeky messaging and birthday-themed imagery, Roundel™ tested seven different versions of creative, featuring the toy brand’s products for a variety of age groups.
$26 ROAS
for top-performing creative versions 4 and 5

The “New at Target” tag on creative version 4 gave it a slight edge over the other versions, indicating that guests may want to buy the newest toys as gifts.
Version 4

Version 5

Results
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.
66M total
impressions
from 7M guests reached
>10x
in media-influenced
sales for every dollar
$19 ROAS
for overall campaign
Campaign Results by Tactic:

- 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.
Conclusion
By using media solutions from Roundel™, the 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.
Let’s change media for good.