California Avocado Displays and Signs to Attract Shoppers at Participating Retailers

Whether it's signs developed by the California Avocado Commission or individual retailers, signage in retailer produce departments grab the attention of consumers when they are shopping for California avocados or other produce items. Retailers have shared with CAC retail marketing directors that they like the new California avocado advertising creative campaign with its locally grown and sustainably farmed messaging. Targeted retailers are showcasing the California avocado-branded signage in their stores, as well as on their websites and mobile apps – reaching customers in-store and online where they shop for California avocados.

Mystery Shopper Display Audit Underway

To gauge how broadly and how well California avocado displays and signage programs are being executed in targeted retailer partner stores, the Commission launched a third-party mystery shopper program in June. Results from this program will help guide future in-store marketing plans.

New Consumer Advertising Continues to Exceed Benchmark KPIs

Across the board CAC is seeing that the consumer advertising campaign media placements are resonating with target consumers and are outperforming benchmarks. Media highlights include:

• From launch in April, all California avocado YouTube campaigns' view rates have remained above 93% and CAC is seeing gradual increases. The general benchmark for a YouTube view rate is 30%
• New Tactic: Display banner ads surrounding retail partners' content with campaign messaging to encourage foot traffic to stores
  • Early June two-week snapshot:
    • About 162,000 impressions total
    • Click-through rate three times the general prospecting benchmark
• Mobile Skin Ads* with media partner GumGum have an engagement rate of 41.62% compared to a 15.00% benchmark. Mobile Skin Ads are a high impact mobile format that consists of a "sticky" anchor banner that expands into a full-screen ad when the consumer interacts with the content. The sticky banner element is always visible, which ensures high visibility and gently encourages users to swipe in order to trigger the expand feature.

Social: CAC's Avocado Bacon Grilled Cheese Pinterest Pin Tops 1 Million Impressions

• On Pinterest, CAC's Avocado Bacon Grilled Cheese recipe pin directly secured more than 1 million impressions and 22,000 clicks
• Content that encourages consumers to engage with the post is also performing incredibly well with more than 200,000 engagements at an average cost of just 2 cents per click. Engagements are any interactions with the post, including link clicks, post shares, comments and likes

California avocado branded ads on Facebook/Instagram are averaging nearly double the engagement (measured as a click-through rate) than last year while ad costs for the posts are about 40% better than last year.

CAC Foodservice Team Connecting with Chain Restaurant Operators

The CAC foodservice team attended the annual Marketing Executives Group conference in Chicago and a Kinetic 12 Emergence Group meeting in Denver, CO to network with targeted chain restaurateurs. The team networked with restaurant marketing professionals at MEG and held a series of deskside meetings with supply chain contacts at the Kinetic 12 event. Both events afforded an opportunity to reach decision makers in multi-unit foodservice and build interest and awareness for fresh, locally grown, seasonal and sustainable California avocados.