Georgia-Pacific Drives Shoppers to Amazon

Atlanta — For some shoppers, rolls of toilet paper bound together in one big bulky package makes for an unappealing shopping experience. Because of this, Georgia-Pacific launched a clever e-commerce-driven campaign around its Quilted Northern brand that actually encouraged shoppers to shop less in stores for toilet paper and subscribe online for Amazon.com’s replenishment service.The campaign launched on August 26, 2016, known as “National Toilet Paper Day,” and ran for two weeks. The effort won two gold Shopper Marketing Effie Awards in the categories of “Single-Retailer Program: Other” and “Seasonal/Event.”Evana Oli, manager, shopper marketing, e-commerce, at Georgia-Pacific calls National Toilet Paper Day a “very forgettable holiday” and says shoppers want to “forget about toilet paper” when shopping. “We were really looking to drive home the value and convenience of subscribing to Quilted Northern on Amazon, eliminating the hassle of lugging a bulky pack around the store.”Amazon’s auto-replenishment tool is called “Subscribe And Save.” Users schedule a monthly delivery or longer (like six months) of everyday items and earn extra savings when subscribing to five or more products. Products from such brands as Tide, Colgate and Quilted Northern are eligible, and the shipping is free.To encourage Quilted Northern loyalists to use the system, the “National Toilet Paper Day” campaign had a self-deprecating tone. A quirky video ran on YouTube, Facebook and Amazon joking about the holiday, even nodding toward a more important day sharing the same day: National Women’s Equality Day. The ad touted a 45% off order of toilet paper on Amazon and called out the replenishment service. The ads worked alongside targeted display media through the Amazon Advertising Platform that included a mobile Amazon.com homepage takeover, paid search on Google, Bing and Amazon, merchandising placements on Amazon.com, email, integration with Amazon’s Alexa, integration with a Quilted Northern Dash button, and a “Deal of the Day” offer on Amazon.Custom photos around the campaign ran on all of Quilted Northern’s social pages, and the Quilted Northern website got a revamp that day to celebrate the holiday and play the funny video. In addition to the digital push, Georgia-Pacific rolled out small pop-up shops in New York and Seattle that focused on shoppers engaging with their smartphones to buy toilet paper and tied into Snapchat geo-filters. The Seattle location was outside an Amazon Building in the South Lake Union neighborhood, while the New York location was in Midtown Manhattan.Additionally, a 360-degree online tour of the pop-up store was housed on Facebook.“It was the first large-scale, manufacturer-led event on Amazon for the paper category,” Oli says. “The omnichannel approach, especially leveraging emerging platforms and technology, along with the overall concerted effort to drive awareness of online subscriptions, made it unique.”In all, the campaign saw 22 million earned impressions across the social pages – twice its expectations, according to Oli. The video received 1.6 million views, and Quilted Northern traffic to Amazon was 70% higher than its monthly average as overall traffic spiked by 200% versus a year earlier.The sales lift amounted to two months worth of volume in a single day, she says, making up a 6,000% lift and a half-million rolls of toilet paper. “Quilted Northern continues to grow and innovate as a brand,” Oli says. “With paper penetration online just at 3-4%, there is still a lot of opportunity to drive category growth for e-commerce.”Georgia-Pacific worked with its agency partners Droga5, New York; Zenith Optimedia, New York; and Performics, Chicago; as well as Amazon Media Group.

Georgia-Pacific Drives Shoppers to Amazon

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