How Suntory PepsiCo Vietnam Beverage maximized reach and reduced waste

In Vietnam, beverage brands are constantly competing for thirsty consumers’ attention. This is especially true in Ho Chi Minh City, where coffee and tea account for about half of consumers’ beverage choices each week, with nutritional health drinks, carbonated soft drinks, and energy drinks making up the other half.¹

For Suntory PepsiCo Vietnam Beverage (SPVB), the country’s largest non-alcoholic beverage advertiser, the best way to stay top of mind with its core audience is to reach them where they spend their time: online. According to Indochina Research, about 66% of Vietnamese consumers have access to the internet — and 90% of them are between the ages of 15 and 55.² And for consumers under 29, 74% of their total media consumption is done online while browsing the web or social media.³

Most of these digitally savvy consumers are exposed to hundreds of ads on a daily basis, so cutting through the clutter and building awareness continues to be a top challenge for SPVB. Previously, the brand served ads across video, search, and display, but its fragmented buying practices made it difficult to accurately measure their cumulative reach.

Looking to maximize campaign reach and reduce overlap across publishers, SPVB partnered with Google and Mindshare, a media agency, to consolidate and control the frequency of its digital media buys.

In the past, SPVB used fragmented, unverified data from local publishers to measure campaign performance. With metrics for impressions, clicks, and reach coming from different sources, the brand could never get a clear, consolidated view of its campaign performance.

This time, SPVB ran a 10-week campaign aimed at male and female consumers between 18 and 44 years old. The team used Display & Video 360 to build and execute cross-channel media buys across direct publishers like YouTube and local ad networks like Admicro, Adtima, Cốc Cốc, Lava, and POKKT. By introducing Campaign Manager as the system of record to measure cumulative campaign reach, the team was able to audit SPVB’s entire media plan.

The Mindshare and Google teams then developed a control and exposed experiment to clearly show SPVB how controlling the frequency of its ad buys would reduce media waste. Ads purchased via a traditional fragmented media buy (premium publisher formats purchased directly from Admicro, Adtima, Cốc Cốc, Lava, and POKKT and YouTube ads bought from Google Ads) were served to the control group, while buys consolidated through Display & Video 360 were served to the experimental group. The team also used Campaign Manager to measure the cost per unique user reached and determine any savings achieved by consolidating the media buys.

When the campaign ended, the experimental group saw a 37% lower CPR than the industry benchmark and a 27% lower cost per unique user reached. The experimental group also saw 1.4X higher potential reach with the same investment as the control group. And best of all, user experience improved because they were no longer served the same ads over and over again.

“Being able to manage frequency and minimize the duplication cross-channel through a fully programmatic setup has proven to be very efficient,” said Chung Thuy Luong, business director at Mindshare.