Ben & Jerry’s is hoping the rollout of sponsored advertisements on Instagram will help boost brand awareness of the chain in Australia, following the launch of a trial last week.
Ben & Jerry’s Australia is among 10 local brands signed up to trial sponsored ads posts on the photo sharing app, including McDonald’s Tourism Queensland, Vegemite, Toyota, Flight Centre, Audi, Lenovo, and Philadelphia Cream Cheese.
Kalli Swaik, brand manager for Ben & Jerry’s Australia, says the partnership is a natural fit for the ice cream chain, and says the initiative is more about building brand awareness and customer relationships than to generate sales.
“People are always looking for ways to engage with other audiences, we’re lucky in that we have a natural space to play in. People love taking photos of their food and ice cream is no different,” Swaik said.
“There are still a lot of Australians that don’t know we’re in Australia or are aaccidentally following an American page, so this is a great opportunity for us to speak to the people that are already tagging Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream.”
Ben & Jerry’s has 400,000 Instagram followers, 7.8 million on Facebook, and more than 11,000 followers on Twitter.
Swaik says sponsored posts will be fun and in line with the brand’s tone and humour, with the content to be based around product and creating different ways for customers to experience the Ben & Jerry’s brand.
“Our fans were already in this space, this just gave us an opportunity to reconnect with them and be somewhere that they are.”
Ben & Jerry’s Australia will run two separate content campings during the course of the trial, which is expected to extend over the next few months.
“One is more of a generic brand campaign, so focusing on our crazy flavours and the product experience, and the second one is to trial how it actually delivers a message, which will be around our new product which is called ‘Chubby Hubby’.
“Instagram is not a channel where you go and put a pop up ad or a big offer with writing all over it, the content that is being produced by brands is extremely high quality, they’re natural and native to the Instagram environment.”
Instagram’s sponsored posts first launched in the US last year, followed by the UK last month.
In the US, Facebook and Twitter have already begun testing e-commerce functionality.
In July, Facebook launched a ‘buy’ button, and a few months later in September, Twitter teamed up with a small number of brands, including Burberry and The Home Depot, to trial a similar concept to a small percentage of users in the US.
The CEO of photo sharing app, Snapchat, Evan Spiege, said earlier this month that people would start to see the first ads on Snapchat also rollout soon.
