Barilla works with Compass Marketing to reach new audiences

Legumes might not be the first ingredient that comes to mind when you think of pasta. For veteran pasta brand Barilla, however, pastas made from legumes such as chickpeas and red lentils represent a new and exciting opportunity. With over 140 years of experience making pasta, Barilla is a world leader in the pasta category and well established when it comes to producing quality pasta products.

Compass Marketing, Barilla’s agency for Amazon Ads since 2016, provides management and guidance for advertising, creative, technology, and digital analytics. Focusing on the challenges of growing Barilla’s legume pasta business, Compass Marketing set to strategize marketing tactics for 2021 that could focus on sharing the new and emerging products to both existing and new customers. Barilla specifically charged Compass Marketing with reaching new-to-brand customers.

Multiproduct focus

Running Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display campaigns, Compass Marketing focused on multiple ASINs, reflecting the range of products involved in Barilla’s goals. Sponsored Brands was used to help defend branded shopping results and for cross-product awareness, showing to both existing and new Barilla customers. Compass Marketing found particular success with Sponsored Brands video, seeing 3x higher click-through rate (CTR) with their Sponsored Brands video ads, compared to static Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Products ads.

Sponsored Display product targeting capabilities were particularly useful to Barilla and Compass Marketing to display ads on the product detail pages of similar products, reaching the right audiences with advanced targeting options. Compass Marketing also used Sponsored Display campaigns to surface ads on Barilla’s own product detail pages.

Consistent review of metrics and analytics allowed Compass Marketing to assess which similar products and categories were yielding the best conversion results for Sponsored Display campaigns. Compass Marketing used its proprietary CDAP (Compass Digital Analytics Platform) software to automatically adjust bids and optimize for each campaign’s objectives.

In the first half of 2021, 63% of the attributed sales across the Barilla legume Sponsored Brands ad campaign came from new-to-brand shoppers.1 In addition, Sponsored Display ads drove a strong engagement and effective rate of conversion with return on ad spend (ROAS) greater than 2x across new-to-brand households, which was double the initial benchmark.2

Holistic marketing with Stores and A+ content

Barilla and Compass Marketing credit the success of their campaigns with an early and ongoing focus on retail readiness and content. An optimized brand Store was especially important to Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Brands video success, while enhanced A+ content on product detail pages helped provide an attractive experience to audiences reached via Sponsored Display.

Brian Pflaum, Senior Account Manager with Compass Marketing, also credits Barilla’s willingness to engage with new ad products and features. “Barilla has been an amazing client who is willing to test out any strategy if they see the value it can bring to their brand,” says Pflaum. “Barilla is a nimble brand that treats Amazon Ads like a laboratory, ready to test out new strategies and ad products as they become available to drive the highest impact for their brands."

Greg Arseneau, Shopper Marketing Manager with Barilla, compliments Compass Marketing’s vital expertise, classifying them as “a partner that has a deep knowledge of Amazon with the tools and passion to test new strategies and drive growth.”

1 Advertiser-provided data, United States, 2021.
2 Advertiser-provided data, United States, 2021.