Berocca is a market-leading multi-vitamin brand that is designed to give people a daily boost. With the UK in a national COVID lockdown and people worried about their health, that boost was needed more than ever and Berocca had huge potential to grow.

But because people weren’t heading out to the shops as frequently as before and people were turning to eCommerce platforms for their shopping (UK eCommerce grew by 46% in 2020 (ONS, Jan 2021)), Berocca needed to give their online sales a boost, making it easier than ever for customers to buy Berocca.

During lockdown more UK Adults found themselves working from home for the first time, and digital audio listening boomed with over 30m UK adults tuning in per week – with the number of people listening on voice activated speakers overtaking desktop/laptops for the first time ever during lockdown. This clearly provided an opportunity – could we drive sales on Amazon using Alexa as the way in?

Whilst Alexa skills provide a new, engaging way for customers to engage with brands, there is often a high cost per interaction; to drive higher usage with the skill we needed to develop an entirely new user journey.

To make things more difficult: there were a number of third-party sellers of Berocca on Amazon making the customer journey more complex. With a cluttered ecommerce marketplace and PPC becoming more expensive, we wanted to find a new way to push consumers directly to purchase.

We rewrote the rule book on Digital Audio Advertising, driving eCommerce by creating the first ever actionable Amazon eCommerce ads

We targeted our customers in the UK when they were at home listening to the radio on their Amazon Alexa device, delivering our messaging during the ad breaks on Global Radio, home to the UK’s best loved radio stations.

In order to deliver a more seamless customer journey that is free from competitor activity, we created a CPG first: Actionable Audio Ads that dropped consumers directly into our Berocca Boost Alexa skill and from there an easy route to purchase.

We executed the first ever Actionable Audio campaign that directly links to an Amazon order, positioning audio as a channel to directly drive sales.

We built an Alexa skill, including a call to action within our digital audio creative. This allowed consumers to jump seamlessly into our Berocca skill directly from our Ad, breaking down the barriers to skill usage, and facilitating a seamless customer journey.

We used dynamic data to deliver a personalised message depending on the weather, time of day, day of week and even called out common lockdown and working from home tasks as in the example above.

Once in the skill consumers had the option to directly order Berocca Boost using their default Amazon payment method & address or find out more about the product – driving both order & future consideration.

The first phase of the campaign delivered over 1.700.000 impressions

23% of people who engaged with the audio advertising purchase Berocca Boost, and 42% find out more about the product. 13.6% uplift in brand favourability after hearing the ad.

Not only that, but this has also become an exciting new channel for Bayer and they are looking to take this to their other brands in the near future.