iProspect: Staples & Waze

Challenge

As media platforms multiply and diversify at an accelerated rate, it becomes increasingly important for brands to maximize each opportunity. This requires knowing where your customer is and aligning marketing investment to reach that person with content and experiences that provide relevant value.

Heading into back-to-school (BTS), Staples wanted to increase store location awareness and drive in-store traffic and sales for their BTS products.

iProspect’s consumer-driven, data-led approach helped Staples identify moms shopping for BTS products as mobile consumers who use Waze, making Waze the perfect platform for a precision audience targeted campaign.

Solution

Staples and iProspect chose Waze, the world’s largest community-based traffic and navigation app, as the campaign platform because Waze had the scale (20 million active users), the right audience (consumers, specifically moms with school-age children), the right context (data showed that most BTS shopping is done in-store, and Waze users are already on the road), and the ability to target specific locations. 

For the test campaign (covering 848 stores in 14 markets), the team implemented the full array of placements on the Waze platform: hyper-local branded pins, zero-speed takeover ads, sponsored search, and a shopper and family destination targeted takeover ad. This diversified strategy created branded touch points at multiple instances throughout the consumer’s experience with the Waze app. 

Result

+ 70% increase in brand recall (measured via follow-up survey) 

+37% increase in search navigations within Waze 

+3.8% lift in incremental BTS units sold in stores tested 

+1.7% lift in incremental store visits in stores tested

With 47K actions including 16K navigations, the campaign delivered an incremental ROAS 2x higher than average display campaigns and an incremental profit ROAS 5x higher than average display campaigns.