Sarah Barron joined Domino’s U.K. & Ireland in 2021 with a track record in food and beverage marketing, launching the company’s growth-driving ‘Domin-oh-hoo-hoo’ campaign.
Pizzas sell like hot cakes in the U.K. Here, Domino’s bakes 112 million pizzas every year. But the pressure is always on in the £4 billion pizza delivery and takeaway sector:
- Value is vital: With fresh takeaway never more than a click away, competition is fierce, and rising living costs mean it is more crucial than ever to demonstrate that we offer great value for money to our customers.
- Spend requires substantiation: Domino's 1,300+ U.K. and Ireland stores are run by franchisees who want to know their dough is being put to good use. Our marketing advisory council, comprising some of our most influential franchisees along with our support office executives, demands to know that every pound we invest in paid media is impactful.
To respond to these challenges, we added even more granularity to our media mix modelling (MMM). The lessons we learned led us to evolve our video advertising strategy. From a more siloed, short-burst approach to YouTube advertising, Domino’s is now showing more branding and more promotions, more often — helping further build its 47% slice of the U.K. pizza market.
Branding plus performance is a force multiplier
YouTube has been a significant part of our media plan, for both brand and performance campaigns, for many years. However, we wanted to better understand how it was contributing to our overall marketing goals.
In 2024, we asked Ebiquity, our MMM agency, and Google to provide a deeper analysis of a whole year of Domino’s YouTube ad performance data.
Until this point, our analysis model had treated all our YouTube ads — whatever the goal — as a single line item. While we knew video advertising worked, we often didn’t know why. However, by slicing this data into its constituent parts — individual creatives, formats, timings, audiences, and locations — we could suddenly differentiate between brand and performance campaigns with granularity.
The first finding burned hot. We discovered that, when we ran YouTube brand awareness campaigns concurrently with YouTube performance campaigns, we saw a 45% increase in overall return on investment from the video platform.
Previously, we had always considered those two campaign types separately. But the new findings were illuminating — we were able to see proof that they are mutually reinforcing.
From burst branding to always-on
This led us to upend how we approached top-of-funnel video ads altogether.
Previously, our approach looked like this:
- Permanent performance: Appetite for pizza is constantly high. With the average U.K. person now consuming 85 grams of pizza per week, our performance ads were running permanently to capture this demand.
- Branding in bursts: But we had chosen to concentrate our brand campaign investment only at particular moments in the year – when sales index and spend was high, driven by key occasions, and when our consumers had disposable income.
Our new data told a more nuanced story: if we are visible more consistently, even at the top of the funnel, the longer-term effects of improved brand perception also give audiences an actionable nudge toward actual purchase.
Ebiquity’s study provided guidance on how much we can invest efficiently depending on the month of the year, week of the month, and even day of the week. It showed that we could increase spend efficiently when there is a high level of demand in the takeaway market. This led to a “fish where the fish are” approach, in which we invest more when the days are short and cold, when people have been paid, and at the weekends.
We decided to evolve this strategy to drive further growth. Just like our performance ads, we made the decision to go always-on with our brand campaigns, too, as far as our budget allows. This mix of brand, product, and offer working together has proved a more powerful recipe than expecting just one of those elements to do all the heavy lifting.
Mass reach drives value perception
Our second finding also helped further optimise our YouTube strategy and ROI.
Traditionally, we tended to think of mass-reach and direct-response campaigns as serving distinct marketing purposes. While we are keen to ensure that price-sensitive customers can get value for money, it was at the bottom of the funnel that we pushed the promotions Domino’s is famous for.
But the new MMM insights showed us that using promotional and offer messages in mass-reach campaigns, those targeting wider audiences, had the potential to drive incremental ROI as well as shift value perceptions.
We seeded this into our campaigns by:
- Creative refresh: We incorporated promotional messaging and offers into our brand-focused creatives, ensuring that even viewers who were not actively looking for deals were aware of our value propositions.
- Reach and frequency: We increased the reach and frequency of our promotional messaging by including it in our “always-on” brand campaigns, ensuring maximum exposure.
- Call to action: We added clear calls-to-action in our brand campaigns, encouraging viewers to take advantage of the offers and visit our website or app.
By pushing deal messaging and conversion campaigns alongside broad reach, our value-for-money sentiment scores have reached an all-time high.
Media mix modelling, redefined
From a historically split approach, Domino's U.K. video investment strategy balances both short-term sales and long-term brand building, side-by-side.
We would not have got there without digging deeper. Media mix modelling has always been our north star.
But bringing more granularity to understanding our video advertising performance has allowed us to be even more deliberate in how we allocate our investment with maximum effect.
If you don’t already model at a more granular level in your MMM, this could be your gateway to more actionable insights that will ultimately help drive media effectiveness and growth.
For the average pizza lover, the changes we’ve made will probably go unnoticed. But this more nuanced view, and a strategy that balances both short-term sales and long-term investment, is already delivering better returns.
