Food Brands Reach Audiences at Scale with BENlabs AI
You’re here because you’re a food or consumer packaged goods (CPG) brand marketer looking to make a real connection with audiences so they don’t skip or ignore what you have to say. You’re thinking about food and cooking influencer marketing and food product placement. Maybe you’re looking for the right AI-driven food brand integration agency for your CPG brand.
That’s BENlabs. We’ve helped clients and products like Tropicana, General Mills Cheerios, Frito-Lay, and Noom (to name but a few) achieve incredible results across influencer marketing, product placement in movies and TV, music partnerships and via our AI tools and industry relationships.
Challenges Facing Food and CPG Marketers
There is no such thing as a captive audience anymore. You don’t need stats or data* to know that audience attention is split; that audiences have more choices of what to watch and where to watch it than ever before. Audiences don’t watch what’s on, they watch what they want, when, where, and how they want. *that doesn’t mean we’re not going to give you stats and data.
Ad Avoidance
Food and CPG audiences are discovering and rediscovering brands and food trends through cooking influencers. They’re following the health advice and recipes that food content creators make. They’re skipping ads the second they get the option and are being exposed to products, including food products, through their favorite music, movie, TV, and social content. At BENlabs, we’ll craft recommendations across the entertainment landscape so you’re there, in all the right places.
Decentralized Content
Movies, music, TV, and social media split audiences. The average household has 5.2 streaming services. There isn’t any one source that all people go to for cooking advice or content. Food and CPG brands need to show up meaningfully, in multiple places, to really make an impact with their audiences.
Data Intelligence and Reporting
Showing up in social feeds, with music artists, in movie theaters or on the hot streaming show is great, but food brands need to know exactly how these content engagements drive brand activations back to their business and they need a guarantee that their efforts will move the needle on the growth KPIs that matter. They need a partner who can make sense of structured and unstructured data to derive clear, actionable business insights.
BENLabs Helps Food and CPG Brands Stand Out
We offer a full suite of AI-driven marketing services ranging from influencer integrations to product placement. Our self-serve AI SAAS puts the BENlabs AI tools, trained over nearly 30,000 campaigns, in your hands. BENlabs proprietary AI models help tech brands find receptive audiences, level-up content, and drive audience action with predictable, measurable results against KPIs.
When you work with BENlabs, you set up your food, cooking, or meal-services brand for success with brand affinity, increased recall, and sales… but we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
Food Brands Are Fighting for Attention
On average, people spend 6.7 years of their life on social media. By contrast, they spend under two years socializing IRL. People watch 5.7 hours of video a day on average, but they’re not watching in any one place. They’re accessing billions of hours of video content spread across thousands of streaming services and social platforms. 93% of us listen to music regularly, and the 27-42 year-olds (millennials) listen 75.1% more than older generations.
There are exciting statistics for any food or CPG brand that has learned to adapt, developing the deep audience intelligence required to meet prospects where they live online. On the flip side, it’s damning data for any brand that sees the diminishing returns on their marketing efforts and doesn’t find the right partner to help them go where the data leads.
For brands, it comes down to a need to get noticed. It’s about more than showing up; your food product or CPG brand needs to stand out. To make a real connection with audiences.
Knowing where to reach audiences is important, knowing how to reach them is at least as important.
On average, people spend 6.7 years of their life on social media. By contrast, they spend under two years socializing IRL. People watch 5.7 hours of video a day on average, but they’re not watching in any one place. They’re accessing billions of hours of video content spread across thousands of streaming services and social platforms. 93% of us listen to music regularly, and the 27-42 year-olds (millennials) listen 75.1% more than older generations.
There are exciting statistics for any food or CPG brand that has learned to adapt, developing the deep audience intelligence required to meet prospects where they live online. On the flip side, it’s damning data for any brand that sees the diminishing returns on their marketing efforts and doesn’t find the right partner to help them go where the data leads.
For brands, it comes down to a need to get noticed. It’s about more than showing up; your food product or CPG brand needs to stand out. To make a real connection with audiences.
Knowing where to reach audiences is important, knowing how to reach them is at least as important.
Are People Skipping Your Food Ads?
Looking at a group of 10 people, nine of them skip ads — including cooking ads. Let’s be honest here; the one remaining person probably got up to grab a snack. Four of the 10 take a more proactive approach and block ads entirely.
The answer isn’t unskippable ads. The answer is to make ads unskippable.
Perrier-Jouët on the tv series “Loot”
What Does it Mean to be Unskippable?
Unskippable ads make food and CPG brand messages an important part of the content. We’re not talking about an influencer saying “This video has been brought to you by…” Rather, it’s aligned content creators across all of entertainment — influencer marketing, product placement in TV and movies, music and artist activations — that use your food or CPG brand as inspiration to create authentic content that connects with audiences.
How to Make Your Food Brand Unskippable
Creators build a relationship with their audience through their content. Being unskippable is all about building your relationship with your target audience through that content.
It’s important to think beyond explicitly food-related content. Everyone needs to eat and people have more than one interest. Looking at an audience beyond a single dimension is key.
BENlabs AI is the key that unlocks that important audience insight.
When a food brand is integrated authentically into the content their target audience loves, that brand becomes a part of the content and audiences wouldn’t want to skip your ad. Even if they could.
Kellogg’s on Lizzo’s music video, “Special”
Challenges in Food and CPG Audience Intelligence
As individuals, personal privacy is important. As marketers, personal privacy is a huge challenge and fundamentally changes the way we market. Today, if our group of 10 people are also iPhone users, eight of them (well eight and half, 85%) have turned on privacy features that make them impossible to know individually.
It’s not just iPhone users. With personal privacy taking precedence and with third-party cookies going away, 10 out of 10 people become unknowable on an individual level.
Add to this the fractured attention we’ve talked about; not just different content creators on different social platforms vying for attention but every show and movie on every streaming service, every movie in theaters or on demand, every new music video, every emerging music artist rising to fame on social media or elsewhere.
Knowing your audiences and the content that moves them is key to successful food product brand integrations. BENlabs AI, specifically audience cluster analysis, is the key that unlocks deep audience intelligence while honoring individual privacy.
Audience InsightS for Food and CPG Brands
The answer to understanding audiences on an individual level isn’t trying to find the gray areas of personal privacy, it’s using AI tools to understand individual behavior without the need for personal data.
BENlabs AI helps marketers build out this deep and granular picture. Our AI tools have been awarded multiple marketing intelligence patents and make all the difference for food brands looking to make an impact in cooking influencer marketing and other brand integrations. With these AI tools and BENlabs’ decades of experience across all of entertainment — movies, TV, music and music videos, in creator content on social media — cooking brands unlock incredible integration opportunities.
Cluster Analysis
Build a clear picture of what content your target engages, unlocking new audiences and new opportunities
Creator Matching
Discover the qualified voices that have the most influence with your most receptive audience segments
Predictive Analytics
Incredible AI-driven predictive accuracy that tells you how audiences will act, expected ROI, CAC, brand awareness, lift, and other KPIs
Competitor Intelligence
See everything your competitors are doing, what’s working and what’s not, to steal away awareness and market share
PHILO Shines in the Spotlight
Streaming TV service Philo had some success with self-directed influencer marketing. Looking to scale up its efforts, it turned to BENlabs. Bringing in more of its cost-conscious, college-aged target audience seemed a logical choice… but it was BENlabs AI surfacing less expected but more receptive targets that turned influencer marketing from a reasonably successful channel to a predictable 10X conversion machine.
With BENlabs AI surfacing new audience clusters — moms, LGBTQ+ audiences, home decor enthusiasts — and working with content creators to share messages around content as opposed to cost, Philo saw an increase in every stat that matters, including a 172% increase in CTR.
Brand Content Integration is the Answer for Food Brands
So what’s a food brand to do? Get placed in movies, music, and TV content? Kick off an influencer marketing effort? Hire a cooking brand agency? Well yes, but those don’t have to be separate efforts or involve a bunch of different vendors.
That’s what we do here at BENlabs. We’ve developed amazing AI tools that no other brand integration agency can match.
Food and Nutrition Influencer Marketing
When you work with BENlabs, our tools will build a complete picture of your current audience and can unlock new, receptive audience clusters based on where those audiences live online. BENlabs AI is the key that unlocks an individual’s online “neighborhood,” with no individual tracking required. We’ve done this for major packaged foods in the health and snack food industry and are ready to help you craft creator campaigns that help you meet and exceed your goals.
Whether you’re looking for an awareness play, a strictly performance play, or any mix of the two, we’ll find the right creators from mega and celebrity status to smaller, niche content creators in highly targeted verticals to ensure you reach the right audiences and can scale results.
Noom, a subscription-based program that helps users make small behavioral changes that add up to big transformations. BENlabs developed a two-part campaign, using AI to find aligned small and midsize influencers in the health, wellness, motherhood, lifestyle, and fitness verticals to introduce audiences to Noom at scale.
Results: Content from 90+ creators netted 5.5M+ views. At its peak, the campaign generated over 3,000 quality signups per month, increasing the Noom customer lifetime value (LTV) from 70% to 90%.
General Mills tapped BENlabs and to build the product placement strategy guaranteed to reach teens with it’s Cheerios product and to drive action.
Our authentic product placements aligned Cheerios with shows on linear TV and streaming platforms like Netflix, Disney+ and Prime Video resulting in 2X their guaranteed impression, 57% had a more positive opinion, and an impressive 29% sales lift for Cheerios.
Food and CPG Product Placement
BENlabs deep relationships across all entertainment unlocks opportunities for food brands in movies, TV, and music videos. After all, characters need props to carry the action and to be believable. From breakfast cereals and toaster tarts to snacks during a sporting event, prop masters are looking for the right products to match the scene—and with product placement, to drive the scene through unskippable moments.
Your brand might be an important part of the plot, and we can help your brand stand out in safe, authentic, story-driven moments viewers can’t miss.
Food and CPG Products in Music Activations
In addition to placing products in music videos, a relationship with BENlabs means unprecedented access to established and emerging music artists.
When you see Lucky Charms co-starring with Charlie Puth in Girlfriend, 1800 tequila co-starring in A$AP Ferg’s New Level and many more hip hop videos, becoming an indelible part of music culture… or any number of other examples, BENlabs did that.
From brand integration in music videos to unskippable influencer-style brand activations with the hottest artists to music licensing and even custom brand-driven new music opportunities, BENlabs can connect your brand with the right audiences in ways that move them into action.
Flaming Hot Cheetos getting some love in Lizzo’s Hot as Hell
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