Australia's Largest Digital Partnership - taste.com.au & Coles - 2015

Award Category
Partnership Award

Agency
NewsLifeMedia

Client
Coles

Objectives

Coles’ research revealed recipe inspiration is a key driver for influencing purchases so it paired with Taste. com.au, which has a database of 40,000 recipes and the largest unique audience of 2.1 million people per month in the food category online. Coles’ objectives were to drive growth in fresh food and online ordering as well as increasing awareness of its everday low pricing. Delivery of consumer insights and analytics to inform product development, marketing and content strategies.

Campaign

The partnership’s mission was to solve ‘what’s for dinner?’ with easy, weeknight family meal solutions that could be shopped online or in-store and cooked on a budget. The first year, (November 2013-October 2014) focused on building foundations through site integration and establishing the partnership. Year two, (November 2014-October 2015) focused on deeper site and data integration, building awareness in Coles’ marketing channels and establishing the supermarket chain as a publisher of food content. The pair worked together to develop a product-to-recipe ingredient matching system which enabled Coles product images and prices to be pulled into Taste.com.au recipes. Ingredients are matched to 5,000 relevant products on special across 750 stores to Taste.com.au’s database. This made for 15,000 different Coles’ product combinations added to recipes at any one time, with users able to purchase ingredients using a recipe-to-cart tool.

Results

Taste.com.au unique users are up 2% YOY across paid, owned and earned media channels and Coles’ recipe views across the site increased by 59% in year two. Awareness of the partnership increased 9% between October 2014 and January 2015. Coles online sales referred from Taste.com.au doubled from year one, the recipe-to-cart tool’s use by new customers increased 185% in the last quarter (at November 2014), and there was a 34% average increase seen in sentiment towards Coles.

Judges Comments

A Long-term evolution of a partnership with true business objectives and solutions. It had a natural fit, real value and synergy for consumers and business.