I’m keenly interested in emerging grocery aisle trends, especially snacks. So I was quick to grab an interview with Andrew Thomas, head of marketing for the meat snack brand Archer, who was being offered to speak to a case study with GumGum regarding pause ads. (We’ll get to that.)
I had seen the popularity of meat sticks firsthand.
My 5-year-old recently started asking for Chomps as a snack (an Archer competitor and contemporary within the category of meat-stick protein snacks selling themselves as better-for-you versions of a Slim Jim), so I was already thinking about the category as a shopper.
Turns out, that was the problem for Archer.
The brand had always been a strong commercial seller, Thomas told me. Archer won distribution deals with major national retailers, grocers and club stores. But it wasn’t really a branded product.
“People were buying grass-fed beef minis, but not the Country Archer grass-fed beef minis,” Thomas said, referring to one of Archer’s core product lines.
Without the brand-building to cement the product recognition and recall for people who tried it and liked it, he said, Archer’s meat sticks were vulnerable to any other company that could call itself “grass-fed beef minis” as well.
Starting in earnest in August last year, Archer underwent a “foundational” rebrand, Thomas said.
The company changed its visual identity, rebranded (to just “Archer”), produced its first video and CTV brand campaign, added a host of ad tech and analytics vendors and created new metric benchmarks for the marketing group.
New benchmarks?
Until a few years ago, when Thomas joined, Archer had never systematically run or much considered consumer audience analytics, he said. There was no tracking of household penetration rate, repeat customer rate, brand awareness state, etc.
One of the things the company learned when it did run consumer and brand lift surveys was that awareness of Archer sticks ranked 11th in the meat snack category, despite being the fourth-largest meat snack brand per Circana ratings.
The new consumer analytics also pointed to potential marketable categories for Archer. Although the meat snack brand category is pretty male-coded, Archer found that it resonated particularly well with mothers of young kids and women who were big on fitness or health. It’s a protein-laden snack that, for that category of ingredient-scouting women, is superior to chips or salty/cheesy-type snacks.
The term “permissible” is now widely used in the entire snack category, Thomas said, as companies big and small try to fit into the category of “snack” while also being “more like real food,” if not healthy.
The whole “protein” trend may have “jumped the shark,” he said. There are protein popcorns, drinks, chips, candies, etc. But once the market “weathers the storm” of the term “protein” being advertised on all the packaging, the trend should benefit companies that have intuitive, actual protein products, he said.
These data-led realizations helped inspire the major rebrand. The company now has a mascot, a blue, person-sized, anthropomorphized buffalo that instructs people to “keep it real” in different scenarios. And the sobering customer analytics findings also inspired the new CTV ad campaign that is “ultimately trying to really bang that drum to let people know who Archer is,” he said.
The company is taking “an old-school reach and frequency approach,” he added.
Archer had previously kept its paid media spend at the very bottom of the funnel. They advertised with Instacart, Amazon, Walmart and other retail media networks where its products are carried. But for channels like display ads, sticking the packaging or a brand logo has little effect when people don’t know the brand Archer, Thomas said.
Pause ads were an interesting alternative, though, he said. They are often static images, not video, but pause ads allow the brand to show more about itself and feature the mascot in a larger way. Also, hey, sometimes the person pausing that video is grabbing a snack, which is a good contextual reminder.
Ongoing attribution
Archer previously didn’t have the omnichannel ad budget to justify much of an expenditure in attribution and media analytics.
Not that it could do much with traditional attribution methodologies, anyways, Thomas noted, since the company doesn’t have its own direct-to-consumer business – it’s all through retailers or online fulfillers like Amazon.
“In a lot of ways, though,” he said, “that actually kind of takes off the handcuffs for us, because we’re less worried about that short-term attribution.”
But he said that Archer doesn’t need a QR code or direct attribution to prove that its pause ads or other CTV spots are driving sales. The company is now running brand awareness lift studies in conjunction with its ad campaigns, and it’s working with other vendors on brand-awareness tracking.
On a month-by-month basis, is Archer gaining overall brand recognition and awareness? Is it adding incremental households?
“Those are the things that we’re taking a hard look at,” he said.
