Marketing snapshot - Hortlink 2017 edition 2

This Hort Innovation Banana Fund marketing snapshot has been taken from Hort Innovation’s Hortlink 2017, edition 2

Hort Innovation invests the banana marketing levy into a range of activities to drive awareness and consumption. These include advertising, public relations (PR), events, social media and more. Here’s an update on some of the latest activity.

Australian Bananas advertising

With the latest round of advertising only recently wrapping up, it is expected results will be available to share in the next edition of Hortlink. Activity included:

• Television advertising. The Australian Bananas TV campaign saw the bananas 15-second commercial run across a staggered four-week period during early April and late April/early May. Activity took place across all major capital cities and key major regional markets.

• Out-of-home advertising. Running since February 19, the latest out-of-home approach complimented the television campaign, with a highly visible presence in high footfall retail and commuter environments. The retail activity, featuring digital poster panels, continued to the final week of the television campaign. Advertising also appeared on buses (in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth) and on trains (in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane) until mid-May, reaching the large portion of people travelling via public transport in metro centres.

• Digital advertising. This activity ran until late May and was designed to:
• Extend the visibility of the TV commercials to the core banana audience across highly visited online environments, to drive high-reaching awareness.
• Deliver Australian Banana messaging through mobile-phone-based banner advertising in highly engaging rich media formats. Again, to ensure our brand stands out, providing a fun and engaging experience.

Advertising also took place at the Sydney Royal Easter Show, from April 6 to 19. For the first time in four years, the Sydney Royal Easter Show fell entirely in the school holidays. Australian Bananas had highly-visible advertisements across the event for its duration, in a number of formats including on the ‘Big Screen’ in the main event arena, and on banner boards and plasma screens across the show.

PR activity

As part of PR activity, dietitian and Australian Bananas ambassador Susie Burrell has continued posting regularly about bananas in her own digital channels, with her website having over 722,000 monthly visitors.

Events

Australian Bananas has continued to sponsor events across the country, including the Gatorade Triathlon Series and Weetbix TRY-athlon, with Australian Bananas ambassador Billy Slater attending the Melbourne event, distributing medals at the finish line and then manning the ‘TRY Hero Signing Zone’.

Feast of the Senses and Guinness World Record

Innisfail was the venue for a Guinness World Record attempt for the Longest Banana Split on March 25, during the Feast of the Senses annual festival. Approximately 2800 participants wearing Australian Banana hats used nearly 43,000 bananas to create a banana split that was 8404 meters in length – beating the previous record of 7677 meters, held since 1988. The new record received plenty of media coverage, include a spot on 7 News and 7 News Cairns social media channels, as well as a spot on popular television show Queensland Weekender.

Bounty Bags

Bounty New Mother bags reach women with new babies. They’re distributed through hospitals nationally by midwives and Bounty representatives, reaching 76 per cent of new mothers around Australia.

As of February, Bounty Bags now include a banana case and fact sheet covering the benefits of bananas both as a snack for new mums, and as a first food for babies. Over 20,000 banana cases have been sent out to be distributed to new mums since February, with the bags handed out to nearly 235,000 new mums so far this year.