Disney, Hershey executives share how holiday marketing campaigns are changing

Marketers rely on the power of the holidays more than the usual time of year. To engage audiences around traditional times 365 days a year, brands are tapping into the Disney platform for campaigns that go beyond traditional advertising.

Hershey is another brand that has teamed up with Disney to support one of its biggest seasons, Halloween. For Vinny Rinaldi, head of US media for CMG and salty snacks at The Hershey Company, the key to collaboration is connecting ideas and connecting content.

“When we started our journey with Disney, we talked about all these different points of integration, it wasn’t just how many dots and dots you can find with us, but you bring our big moments to life. ?” the executive said.

Rinaldi discussed the partnership with John Campbell, senior vice president of entertainment and streaming solutions for Disney Marketing, during a Marketing Week New York panel moderated by Marketing Dive senior reporter Chris Kelly .

The following Questions and Answers are from the larger discussion, and have been edited for clarity and brevity.

MARKETING DIVE: Obviously, Hershey’s is synonymous with Halloween. Why invest with Disney in particular this season?

VINNY RINALDI: We have 23 days and counting until it’s clear that our Super Bowl is over. It is the most important time of the year. But if you look at our business, we really divide our business between seasons. We have big tents: Valentine’s Day, Easter, Halloween and holidays. When you think about our year versus the day-to-day business, and then align with what Disney is doing, in terms of the news calendar, there are a lot of things that line up very well.

When you think of “31 [Nights] of Halloween” [on Freeform]it’s the most natural fit – but it probably took us a year and a half to sell it to our internal stakeholders. All the content on their platform, all the time spent with that content, felt very natural, from a Halloween perspective.

How do you approach the holidays with promotional programs and opportunities?

JOHN CAMPBELL: At Disney, we think every day is a holiday. This kind of sounds like a joke, but… It’s their big break. Same thing with sports. Sports is a religion. If you think of college football and College GameDay, that’s like a holiday in itself.

We think about this everywhere for Disney, and with these big holiday tents, we have families coming together, hanging out, watching whatever we get on Disney+ or Hulu. It brings them together.

And it’s not always just Halloween, the Super Bowl or the Oscars. For Groundhog Day, we worked with Frito-Lay, and we brought back some ideas. It made time for that day, and no one really thinks of that day as something like a holiday. We have the ability to do that with models that really dig and create.

What does cultural content look like at Disney, and what are you trying to achieve with that?

RINALDI: You are taking some of the highest standards in the entire ecosystem that we are following right now. You have amazing content from the entire portfolio, whether it’s Disney, Hulu or Freeform. When considering these different touch points, what will make your brand stand out?

There is a lot of noise everywhere you go. There is a lot going on at any given time. There is a daily holiday around something. If you’re only going to give a 15-second spot, it better be the best 15 seconds you’ve ever done, and that’s very hard to do today. How do you take content links on top of your beautiful site and bring this whole platform to life?

Tell me about Reese’s relationship with Angel Reese.

RINALDI: Some things come easier than not. His followers were called Reese’s Pieces. It was the perfect time for us to lean on. How do you prepare for those? What position do you place yourself in? How do you listen to what’s happening in the public world?

We quickly assembled a team and brought it to life. It was one of those moments where you realize that the media is not what it used to be. You have to be able to act in real time in those moments, and you’ve got a dynamic team to be able to do something like that, but also reflect the cultural value and be authentic to that moment. and impersonate the person’s true name.

CAMPBELL: Those things are really hard to do. When we think about our lifetimes, we do over 30,000 events on ESPN every year – how do we take that lifetime and work with a brand that can come in turnkey and say, “Let’s trust each other .Let’s do this together, then find ways to measure.

How do you measure something like this to justify this investment?

RINALDI: This is why it took us 18 months to get this in the door, mainly because the way we measure the size of our environment is in media planning. When you make it correlate very well with your business, you start to believe in it even more. Low revenue gets high ROI, but the other side of the equation is success, and success is the revenue generated by that channel. I think we always lose sight of the other side because we only look at the CPMs that we’ve got down against the more expensive media that’s actually driving more success, which is more money to the upside.

When you reverse the equation and don’t focus on just one ROI number – don’t get me wrong, it’s very important – but when you change the story internally and talk to your leadership and walk them through this , you didn’t. an understanding of looking at the cost of what Halloween integration will look like because of the impact and synergy it creates for our business.

If you look at the power of Disney’s ideas and connections, then you get, in this case, a two-fold return on investment, as well as a three-fold growth in efficiency, which is a high level of income during the most important period. of our year – which last year gave us our first billion dollar season on Halloween. When you start around that moment, you can start connecting that many of these things play a role in driving revenue for the company.