Moet & Chandon marketing chief details early wins from its first shoppable video advertising campaign

Building brand desire, opening up occasions and getting consumers to trade up are just some of the wins Moet & Chandon is already seeing from its world-first shoppable video advertising debut with New Corp Australia.

Moet & Chandon and News Corp unveiled the new shoppable in-video advertising campaign this week, allowing consumers to click or swipe while in video content in order to purchase personalised champagne bottles and packaging. The shopping capability works both horizontally and vertically in video, is being powered by interactive technology company, Vudoo, and can be used for on and off-platform video ecommerce offers as well as across a wide range of ecommerce stacks.

The national campaign is designed to put the Moet & Chandon brand front-of-mind for end-of-year celebrations and gifting and is running on News Corp’s Vogue brand platform. It’s Moet Hennessy’s first shoppable advertising activation and will be followed by a similar video shoppable advertising campaign for Moet’s sister champagne brand, Veurve Clicquot.

Moët Hennessy Australia and New Zealand marketing and consumer engagement director, Scott Bowie, told CMO the Moët & Chandon campaign is more about engagement with content to drive desire and occasion-based salience, rather than acquisition of new consumers, and noted the brand already has quite high awareness in Australia.

The shoppable video follows a ‘Choose your own adventure’ format, allowing Australians to interact within the magical world of Moët Birthdays, and discover personalised gifts and celebration sets.

“Our aim with the campaign is primarily to build desire, encourage our consumers to explore the portfolio beyond Imperial and more strongly associate Moët as the Champagne for birthdays, the products we offer, featuring cutting-edge personalisation, are an extension of this,” Bowie said.

“Our offerings feature personalisation across Brut Imperial and Rosé Imperial bottles, Imperial Magnum, our exclusive Gold Imperial Magnum and on gift box for Grand Vintage 2013.

“For celebrations, we have created a curated range of ‘Celebration Sets’ complete with glassware and ice buckets, or in a set of 24 individually personalised minis with sippers ideal for place settings or party favours. Lastly, For the ultimate birthday celebration, we offer the Moët & Chandon Ultimate Birthday Celebration Concierge Service.”

The core launch campaign runs for six weeks and features a number of Australian and global firsts including an Australian-first user experience design and personalisation animation onsite as well as Shopify shoppable video with News Prestige.

For Bowie and the team, personalisation is a prominent trend in gifting across many different categories, including luxury.

“In wanting to take the gift of Moët & Chandon champagne to the next level, we wanted to find a personalisation technique that met the aesthetic standards of the brand and maintained the integrity of the Champagne, an inherently delicate product,” he explained. “While the brand has explored techniques in the past, and we see many problematic techniques in the market like engraving, the technique we ultimately found is a type of printing which applied messages to the bottle, or in the case of Grand Vintage, giftbox.

“In selecting our product range, it was a deliberate decision for most of our offerings to be bottle offerings rather than giftbox, in an effort to minimise our eco-impact with giftboxes.” Bowie added bottles are shipped nationwide in eco-friendly, recyclable and compostable packaging.

Moet & Chandon’s campaign also includes an innovative, full-funnel test with Meta to understand the impact of influencer content versus brand content that has been supported by the Meta global agenda.

As part of the collaboration, News Corp and Moet & Chandon created campaign content together for usage across all of channels and theirs. Bowie commented the balancing act between shooting for long format narrative video for editorial and shooting for shoppable was an interesting and new challenge.

“This was also the first time we had integrated our Shopify checkout within a third-party platform using a custom API, which posed some pressure points around launch timings,” he continued. “It’s been an incredible collaboration with News Corp Australia to get this campaign live, from the creation of the actual videos through to the website and stunning content.”

While it’s early stages for the campaign, Bowie was energised by the depth of insight received on the consumer journey through the shoppable video dashboard, alongside Shopify and Meta reporting. He said this data would be key to strategic plans around segmentation and in how that can further build the Moet brand as well as inform across the portfolio.

“We can see real-time what our consumers are engaging with and their progression along the funnel, providing us with a unique view of the full journey from top to bottom funnel,” he said. “Engagement from our consumers has been excellent, and we’re seeing purchases across our range nationwide. Overall engagement within the interactive video is currently sitting at three times the industry benchmark, showing how strong the content that was captured in partnership with Vogue is performing.”

He also noted the basket size of those taking up the video-based offers was higher than the average online at the moment: $140 to $90.

As to results Bowie is looking for short and longer-term to gauge impact, success centres around engagement with the content, and deeper insight into how consumers interact with value-added offers from the brand along the funnel.

“Shoppable content and simplified consumer journeys are at the forefront of digital media campaigns, providing an engagement with the brand and frictionless shopping experience,” Bowie said. “It was this engagement and ease of interaction that attracted us to the shoppable video innovation with News Corp, providing an elevated experience approaching luxury for the brand, that is beyond the traditional bottle shop shelf.”

While the benefits of having conversion capability in advertising are clearly obvious, one of the potential concerns brands need to navigate around social commerce and shoppable third-party advertising is customer experiences and sentiment around the journey and fulfilment. A recent SimplicityDX report, for example, showed two-thirds of social shoppers are more cautious about shopping on social networks again after returning a product purchasing in those channels.

Bowie said Moet Hennessy was conscious of the heightened and amplified risk and said how to manage anything that might go wrong as well as shoring up the model and fulfilment formed a significant part of testing. In addition, the launch of the shoppable video advertising was backed up by 24/7 customer service.

News Corp Australia managing director of client product, Pippa Leary, said the shoppable video ad product would allow brands to turn audience engagement into unmatched ‘buy now’ outcomes. The media giant first unveiled the capability during its D_Coded event in May and said it’s talking to several clients about harnessing shoppable video advertising.

“Through this we are able to measure brand interactions, time spent with the ad, online purchase, and in-store attribution through News Connect’s measurement capabilities regardless of the channel,” she said. “This gives us the unique ability to work with our clients through the entire purchase funnel from notice, to want and now to buy. After the launch of News Compare last month, this is the next in our product suite aimed at moving high intent audiences through to purchase.”

News Corp said it can also target shoppable videos to its shopper audience segments through its owned first-party targeting capabilities. The shoppable ad units will be VAST (Video Ad Serving Template) and VPAID (Video Player-Ad Interface Definition) enabled to be amplified across News Corp Australia’s premium brand environments and across the open Web, with purchase capability intact and contained within the video experience.