Honey Nut Cheerios is on a mission to inspire happy hearts. With more than 100 million Americans having some form of heart disease, Cheerios understands how important heart health is and wants to remind Americans that a happy, heart-heathy lifestyle can be fun, easy, and delicious.
Honey Nut Cheerios (HNC) was looking for a strategic partner to provide tools and motivation on how to live a holistic heart healthy lifestyle.
Our target audience was people who understand the importance of eating well. This encompasses people aged 40-65 who are at a variety of life stages. But despite their differences, they all acknowledge the importance of whole-person wellbeing to fuel their next chapter.
And we knew they would be open to change, with 9 in 10 willing to change current behaviors in order to achieve a healthier lifestyle (Meredith proprietary insights).
Our strategy was to do something never before done in publishing. We brought together four of Meredith’s editorial brands — Real Simple, EatingWell, Shape, and Health — on behalf of Cheerios and created an HNC-branded website that gave people the tools they need to succeed on their journey to heart health. Our brand-agnostic content informed, inspired and educated our visitors.
Our interactive microsite leveraged each publications’ specific expertise to build our messaging around the four factors that contribute to a happy heart: Passions, Nutrition, Fitness, and Wellness.
The moment people clicked onto our site, we captured their attention with an engaging landing page that introduced the content experience. Viewers were presented with the four chambers of a symbolic heart, each one aligned with a different pillar of holistic heart health and a Meredith brand.
From there, they clicked on a chamber to view authentic, inspirational, and aspirational content that related to the pillars. This included articles, infographics, quizzes, quick tip pop-ups, and videos that we produced. These videos featured holistic health guidance, such as exercise routines, recipes, and mindfulness meditation.
To tap into our digital savvy target audience, we created an Alexa Skill tied to Health which was activated with a custom wake phrase: “Alexa, ask My Daily Mindset for a happy heart.” This took consumers to relatable health tips from HNC, which we promoted via social.
In total, we published eight videos, 20 quick tips, and 20 inspiring articles over a five-month period, spacing publishing by a matter of weeks to keep people coming back for more. To make the article content even more memorable and engaging, we enlisted diverse talent to bring the copy to life with custom illustrations, animated gifs, gorgeous photography, and cinemographs.
We made it easy for people to act on the advice, integrating an innovative Multi-Retailer Cart Capability, whereby people could add the ingredients mentioned in specific articles to their online shopping carts. The cart then pulled in their local information to ensure the products were available at that individual’s local retailer. While native videos linked to Amazon Fresh, the multi-retailer cart on native articles was facilitated through Basketful, with participating leveraged retailers including Walmart, Target, and Aldi.
Social drove the message far and wide. We used organic social posts from the editorial brands on Instagram Stories, Facebook and Twitter — a testament to the campaign’s authenticity; the native content was true to the kinds of content these brands normally create editorially. Custom content was distributed on Meredith's and HNC social platforms. 60+ dark social posts drove people to the individual articles, video creatives, and the custom microsite.
Knowing the Health magazine readership would engage with this content, we created an advertorial in Health that featured a QR code to seamlessly link the offline and online experience, driving further traffic.
To further drive our reach, custom content was distributed through Meredith Owned&Operated via traffic drivers across their suite of editorial brands, and we also created five custom co-branded newsletters with Real Simple.
In a matter of weeks, we delivered results that went beyond our wildest expectations with more than a quarter of a million unique visits to our website.
Importantly, the social media promotion was at the heart of our success; our social videos earned 6.3 million views with a 23.7% video completion rate. That was 22% over benchmark. In total, we achieved 9.3 million video views on the platform with an average time spent of 70s — 9% above the industry benchmark.
Promotion of the Alexa Skill via social achieved a brilliant 4.65% engagement rate, 52% over benchmark. This helped our activation became the best performing Skill launch to date, outperforming our other Skills in the wellness category by up to 3x across key metrics.
Finally, the Multi-Retailer Cart Capability was a hit with our readers with a CTR 133% over benchmark.
The results were so good that we just went live on year two of the program, delivering more unique, engaging and inspirational content that will help people continue on their path to optimal heart health and live a more fulfilling life in the process.
