Singapore’s food & dining industry has never been more vibrant. According to Locala’s IHS Markit research, it was worth $61 million in 2019 and is predicted to weigh more than $80 million by 2023.
But with a growing number of people turning to delivery apps and home-cooking, getting diners into physical restaurants has become a real challenge for brands. Restaurant chain Nando’s was experiencing this firsthand.
Nando’s partnered with media agency Vizeum Singapore and Locala to increase their visibility and drive more customers to their physical dining spots. To get diners off their couch, Locala developed a customized drive-to-store strategy using interactive mobile ad formats to engage with audiences with a proven interest in Nando’s restaurants.
The advertising campaign was split into two phases. Phase one was specifically executed to drive interest for Nando’s newest ‘Mango and Lime Peri-Peri’ range through an engaging ad format. Phase two focused on actively driving diners to visit Nando’s physical restaurant locations by retargeting users who had already shown interest by interacting with the phase one creatives.
To ensure phase two grabbed consumers’ attention, we used our Multi-Store DCO ad format, combining branded product content with a Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO) feature to help consumers identify the closest Nando’s restaurant. Locala targeted diners within a 500-meter distance of a Nando’s around mealtimes, and leveraged their real-time location to deliver a live map with detailed walking or driving directions to their nearest restaurant. Unlike traditional radius targeting, we combined our Dynamic Catchment Area tool and Fusio, our proprietary drive-to-store platform, to target people based on real-world behavior – ensuring Nando’s received maximum ad exposure and incremental visits.
Because we’re never judge and jury of our own performance, we leveraged third party visitation data from independent partner Adsquare to measure incremental visits to Nando’s restaurants. These results were integrated into our platform to optimize the campaign in real time towards more physical restaurant visits.
The Nando’s campaign generated meaningful business outcomes for the brand. It reached an impressive 800,000 Singaporeans over its month-long duration and drove more than 10,000 visits to restaurants. This represents a 1.51% visitation rate – 1.5X higher than the market average. Among the total visits registered in Nando’s restaurants, over 4,000 were incremental – with an impressive footfall uplift of 72%.
The ad formats delivered fantastic engagement in phase one – with 64% of users gaining more awareness of Nando’s and their newest ‘Mango and Lime Peri-Peri’ range. Phase two also delivered outstanding results with us optimizing ad performance to increase visits to Nando’s outlets by 74% during the campaign – with more than 38,000 users clicking to display the map to their nearest Nando’s restaurant after ad exposure.
“We were really pleased with the execution and results of the campaign. The Ad Unit was fun and engaging – bringing to life the Nando’s youthful brand persona. Plus, we achieved excellent results that addressed the core objective of the brief – drive customers into our Nando’s restaurants. Coupled with Locala’s measurement methods, we were able to get an accurate view on the additional customers that could be directly linked to the ad campaign.” – Juleana Ng, Nando’s Marketing Manager