The Campaign

The truth about new news and current affairs stories is that they have never had a shorter use-by date than they do right now. Audiences have an insatiable hunger for the newest of the new - Streets had to find a way to keep up with this ever-evolving cycle. In the absence of new product news Streets need to develop a way of becoming part of the conversation within popular culture by being hyper-relevant and hyper-humorous. We had to poke, prod and make fun of new news, as it happened. To tap into consumers cravings for new news we launched the ‘Streets News Team’, a data fuelled news team which was able to source and produce comical spins on the hottest stories about sports, music, movies and popular culture in a matter of 24hours, makes Streets the constant new news facilitator across summer.

Creative Execution

To bring Street’s news room to life you’d expect a lengthy process of watching trends, writing full-blown ads, producing, trafficking and targeting 100s of versions. Instead we reduced the process down to a few of hours via our algorithm that helped us predicted, prioritise and estimate reach on the hottest topics about to trend on YouTube, ahead of time. In a global media first, we combined Google’s dynamic creative technology ‘Vogon,’ with our algorithm - allowing creative teams to quickly build messages on the identified topics and deploy them, all within 24-hours. So when Aussie Tennis player Nick Kyrgios stormed off court on the 18th of January, our own Cornetto was commenting on the incident, right amongst tennis-related content on YouTube. Our comical news breaks featured across the 2016 Summer, more than 10 million times with 50 news stories based on our algorithm.

Despite more than 23 new ice cream launches across the summer, Streets still managed to cut through the noise and be part of the conversation. We saw a 4.4% increase in penetration across four of the major brands, with significant uplifts in sales. Our news anchor Cornetto drove the highest lift of all, achieving a massive 34% YOY growth in volume sold. Further, we saw a monumental 42.7% increase in ad recall as a direct result of this campaign. We successfully tapped into the power of hyper-relevance, to put Streets back on the lips of Australians everywhere. Using new technology, we put Streets at the heart of real life, in real time, with real results on a massive scale.

Despite owning Australia’s most famous and well-loved ice creams, Street’s 2016 Summer fortunes were melting. Sales growth had slowed, penetration was dropping, and their iconic flavours were losing relevance. To get Streets back on the lips of adults everywhere, we had to speak in their language. We made an algorithm that predicted the content about to trend on YouTube, then served hundreds of unique messages tailored to each new trend, event or topic as they happened. We smashed all campaign metrics and delivered record-breaking levels of campaign recall, putting Streets Ice Cream back on the lips of adult Australians everywhere.

Insights, Strategy and the Idea

To establish the ‘Streets News Team’ studio we followed where people go for up-to-date news on any topic. YouTube is home to almost 50 years’ worth of new content daily. It’s where people catch the latest news story, song, or movie trailer as it breaks. It epitomises the new and now. It’s the perfect place for Streets News Team to setup their studio and also a haven for us to form our data strategy. Using YouTube consumption data & Adwords inventory data we created an algorithm that helped us predict the future (almost). This made Streets the most informed and relevant ice creams in the world, cumulating in the creation of a raft of Streets Mini-News Segment which re-placed regular pre-rolls on Youtube. Now we had a format and media environment, our challenge lay in finding the most relevant and up to date topics to focus on in our messaging.