Westward Whiskey Wins with Local Personalization

Seeking to break through as a brand and drive the burgeoning American single malt whiskey category, Portland, OR-based craft distillery Westward tapped Aki Technologies to implement a hyper-focused marketing campaign as part of its broader digital media strategy.“We’re a small brand trying to build awareness, but we don’t have the budget to go and build mass awareness across the country … so it’s [about] trying to build awareness with the right type of people in terms of the campaign,” Westward CMO Richard Black told the Path to Purchase Institute. “Being a $70 whiskey, we’re really luxury and targeting a very specific audience.”Marrying Westward first-party data with Aki’s third-party data, the partners identified three consumer segments to seek out in the distiller’s home state of Oregon and neighboring California: Oregon Lovers – affluent, OR-based whiskey drinkersWest Coast Whiskey Lover – older, high-income whiskey drinkersCA Cool Whiskey Drinkers – young, social, CA drinkersWhile two of the target segments leaned toward traditional purchasers, the “CA Cool” segment was added into the mix based on Aki’s consumer mapping recommendations. “It was great because we wanted to get some learnings out of this campaign as well. Testing the audience, testing the regionality and then testing against other media sources like Google and Facebook,” said Black, a spirits industry veteran who had briefly worked for Aki before joining Westward.From Dec. 14, 2020, to Jan. 12, the partners served up rich media and video ads targeted by segment and further personalized via Aki’s "moments powered by motion" approach, totaling more than 220 creative permutations and generating 1.5 million impressions.“The creative wasn’t 100% where I would have wanted it to be but it’s a trade-off,” Black said, referring to the ease and speed of execution possible with Aki’s algorithm. “I just give [Aki] some assets, we create these and — boom — we’ve got 220-odd permutations of moments and personalized ads that are proven in this test we ran to be more effective.”The personalized creative drove higher engagement rates across all of the consumer segments:Personalized video drove 22% higher engagement than non-personalized video.Personalized interstitials averaged 44% more engaging than non-personalized.Overall, personalization drove 33% higher engagement than non-personalized creatives.“That’s the kind of metrics that Aki can track and are very useful but what’s useful to me as a brand owner and somebody who wants to drive the business is: How many people are coming to visit my website? How many people are going to the retailer stores where we’re sold? And we saw incredible traffic. We still, since we ran the campaign, have never had traffic like that to our website, even from Facebook and Google, where we spend relatively significant money over time," Black said.While Westward tested tap-to-map ads directing consumers to a nearby retailer, the campaign objective was to maximize digital engagement so most of the ads linked to Westward’s website. “Our website is where we can capture consumers and we’ve found workarounds [to restrictive regulations] where we can ship to 25 states in the U.S. … so traffic there is as critical as driving people to retail stores at the moment for us,” Black said.That’s a bold strategy for a category that has historically shied away from the e-commerce business for a myriad of reasons. “The spirits industry is a little behind when it comes to digital,” Black said. Yet the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the shift online in this category as in others, and Westward moved rapidly to adapt to the change in consumer behavior.One of the key learnings that came out of the campaign and will inform Westward's future digital engagement efforts was the importance of a landing page to close the sale.“I would have wanted stronger conversion rates on the click-through, and we needed a landing page because consumers never knew our brands. We were getting these incredible amounts of traffic, and they were just landing on the product page so they weren’t getting enough information around what this is and why I should buy it,” Black said.

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