Artificial Intelligence is one of THE buzzwords in marketing. The only thing is: Nobody has really mastered the challenge of turning AI into productive media solutions –yet. So, what if we told you we made things even a little more difficult and provided the first case to bring AI to linear television?

To drive interest and purchase intent for REWE’s fresh and regional products, we introduced an AI-fuelled algorithm to the traditional TV. Thus, using both the massive reach and highest branding effects of TV and customer centricity of digital media – bringing both worlds together and combining their strengths.

Supermarket chain REWE ranks second in the German food retail industry – and when you are second you clearly want to become first. To get there, REWE strives to continuously outsmart their competition. When advertising their fresh and regional fruits and vegetables (a megatrend in Germany) they were facing a specific challenge:

Market research had shown that last year’s one-fits-all TV strategy had increased REWE’s overall brand awareness – but just could not deliver on purchase intent. The reason was clear but the solution much more challenging: The traditional approach to TV did cut through – but was simply not specific enough. It didn't allow us to deliver the tailored messaging necessary to impact purchase intent. So, we needed to find a way to (1) continue to deliver branding at scale whilst (2) increasing the relevance of our messaging to connect on an emotional level to drive purchase intent.

Everybody needs to eat and almost everybody likes regional food which makes TV just the right media channel to quickly and efficiently generate considerable reach in a broad audience. On the other hand, it leaves no room for personalisation – making it just the wrong media channel for the needed specific messaging. Then there are digital media channels with advanced potential for personalisation. But they just cannot compete when it comes to reach and branding effects. So what do we do?

We challenged ourselves to take the most promising principles from that digital world and infuse them into one of the most classic media channels. And we meant that quite literally: we brought together the perfect mixture of machine learning algorithms, automated sentiment analyses and dynamic creatives – all executed with maximum reach in good old linear TV.

Finding the perfectly fitting context is crucial and “The Perfect Dinner” – Germany’s no1 cooking show – was just the Jack to our Jill (well, our products of course).

The thing is: none of the “digital principles in TV” bit had ever been done before. In fact, Artificial Intelligence alone is one of THE buzzwords in marketing. Everybody likes to talk about it – until you ask for actual use cases. You hardly find any. But who wouldn’t be up for a challenge, right?

TV advertising in Germany has been more or less the same since the first TV spot was aired back in 1965. But we decided to break with every part of the planning process, develop three modules from scratch to completely change how we traditionally advertise in today’s most important media channel.

Ingredient 1: An AI-based approach that automatically analysed the TV programme: The data obtained allowed us to serve our message right when one of our pre-defined keywords was mentioned – fully automized at scale.

Ingredient 2: A sentiment analysis made sure our ads were only displayed when the protagonist said something nice about our products while all the negative and unfit context was excluded.

Ingredient 3: Dynamic ad frames were integrated into the running TV programme as soon as one of our keywords was mentioned in a positive context. When someone said “Uuh, some nice tomatoes?” the frame dynamically displayed a fresh, perfectly fitting tomato ad. All within the running programme! No trailer, no ad break.

There you have it, the principles from the digital world – pushing the boundaries and making best use of the strengths of good old linear TV and advancing it with an unprecedented AI approach.

Our approach resonated incredibly well with our audience.

Among those who watched the new form of advertising, 84% showed an increased purchase intent for REWE’s fresh and regional products. That is a completely unprecedented figure and this number alone would probably suffice to demonstrate the approach’s power. Just two more things:

Excellent fit leads to excellent ad recall: Through exposure, REWE's already high ad recall figures were increased by astounding 42%

… and likeability: 85% of viewers said the contextual integration was innovative, creative and contextually fitting.

Better watch out for the next A(I)ttack of our killer tomatoes – they obviously don’t miss their targets.