Hill’s Pet Nutrition Finds the Winning Formula for Measurable Growth

Intro

A global leader in science-based nutrition for dogs and cats, Hill’s Pet Nutrition is on a mission to enrich and extend the special relationships between people and their pets. A part of Colgate-Palmolive, Hill’s uses groundbreaking research to develop specialized food formulas that help pets around the world live long, healthy lives.

As pet ownership has evolved, so has Hill’s approach to marketing. The number of pets and pet owners, already on the rise, grew even more during the pandemic. While Hill’s had long targeted older audiences, demographic shifts have given them new audiences to reach as well. Younger generations increasingly view their pets as full-fledged family members worthy of premium care, and more young people are starting family life with a pet rather than with children. Hill’s needed new ways to connect effectively with today’s pet parents – both existing customers and potential new ones.

The Challenge

To identify and reach the right audiences, the Hill’s team needed more insights than they could uncover from their first-party data alone, which included fragments of the customer journey and left them with an incomplete understanding of their customer. They were spending more on advertising as their business grew, but without the ability to clearly connect advertising to sales, measuring and optimizing their media investments was a struggle.

The Hill’s team wanted to be able to prove the value of their marketing investments, grow the business, and get their life-changing nutrition to more pets.

The Solution 

Hill’s had been partnering with LiveRamp on data onboarding and activation since 2017, but when Joe Keating, Senior Analytics Director at Hill’s, read about LiveRamp’s partnership with Danone in 2021, he realized how much more Hill’s could be doing with LiveRamp. 

Hill’s began to collaborate with retail partners in the LiveRamp Clean Room to expand audiences, connect the customer journey, and measure impact across channels. Leveraging LiveRamp’s unparalleled scale, Hill’s can collaborate with retailers, publishers, third-party data providers, retail media networks, and any other partner they choose. For example, retailers can share transaction and CRM data, and Hill’s combines that data with media data, demographic data, and their own first-party CRM and website data – both online and offline – to see a much fuller view of the customer journey and connect advertising tactics to sales. LiveRamp’s strict neutrality allows Hill’s to collaborate and measure performance in an environment of transparency and trust – and because Hill’s retailers are already part of the LiveRamp data collaboration network, it’s much easier to dive in together. 

To measure the impact of these expanded activation efforts, Hill’s adopted Cross-Media Intelligence for the LiveRamp Clean Room – a first-of-its-kind solution that provides a truly unified, deduplicated view of media performance across channels, publishers, and tactics. For the first time, Hill’s can see performance across all their investments in one place.

The Results

Hill’s is reaching and converting new customers in a more strategic and accountable way by tapping into rich third-party data in the LiveRamp Clean Room. In just one specific use case, Hill’s worked with a premium data provider that has transaction data covering 98% of all pet food sales, as well as rich customer data with no personally identifying information (PII), to identify and target new customers not currently shopping on Hill’s channels. They began with simple tests that have become more sophisticated as their collaboration has evolved. Hill’s now has a predictive model to identify the most promising prospects, and they can define campaign audiences and activate in one place. This clean room collaboration has had powerful results – the number of prospects converting who are new buyers has increased by 150%, a huge win for both Hill’s and its retail partners.  

Hill’s is also unlocking a unified, measurement-ready view of performance across their more than 15 partners – including retailers, publishers, and third-party data providers – with Cross-Media Intelligence for the LiveRamp Clean Room. “If I go into a store, I expect to get a receipt and if we’re spending money with publishers, we should be getting something back in return to prove what it’s doing. Done in the right way, this can be a win-win situation,” Keating said, “I’m honestly a small child before Christmas in terms of what we’re able to access.”

With this unprecedented campaign visibility, the Hill’s team can make even smarter and faster decisions to optimize their media investments. As Keating put it, “In the past, everything was so retrospective. We were always struggling with how quickly we could get information back to people making decisions, on what we were going to change. That’s 1,000% different now.” The team works much more closely and dynamically with their publishers.

As the Hill’s team uses data collaboration to better reach and serve customers, they remain focused on what matters most: a healthy pet.  They are investing in the power of their nutrition to make a difference in pets’ lives – and in the lives of the humans who love them.