Peet’s, an icon in coffee, is loved across the U.S. by older generations. Though GenX and Boomer coffee drinkers are critical to Peet’s ongoing success, even more important is attracting a younger coffee drinker, who represents the future of the business. In fact, the coffee initiation age has steadily dropped over the past decades to the point where 14.7 years old is now when most people begin consuming coffee. Moreover, younger drinkers aren’t brewing black coffee at home in the morning. They’re grabbing it ready-to-drink, on-the-go. 64% of GenZ and 47% of Millennials prefer flavored, cold coffee, consumed away from home. In response, Peet’s brewed a delightful, caffeine-filled iced espresso and put it in cans, available in just about every grocery store and 7-11 across the country. It was our job to put Peet’s on younger drinkers’ radars by getting them excited about Peet’s Iced Espresso.

The primary objectives were to drive awareness and consideration of its new Iced Espresso drinks among younger consumers. To measure awareness we monitored estimated ad recall lift and total impressions. To measure consideration we tracked the degree to which our audience leaned into content by looking at metrics like total completed video views and video completion rate.

The starting point for our strategic process was to really understand our audience. We began by using syndicated research tools to identify an audience that would uniquely identify with the product attributes of Iced Espresso—an energy-rich coffee treat that is also not that bad for you. What we discovered was that a huge percentage of US adults, nearly 150MM Americans, in fact, are very comfortable living in a lifestyle paradox. They generally try to eat wholesome foods and lead a healthy life, but they balance this with a little indulgence from time to time. We named this audience “Rationalizers”.

The good news for Peet’s is that 58% of Rationalizers are moderate to heavy coffee drinkers – a real business opportunity, and the largest subset of Rationalizers are Millennials—a younger audience Peet’s wants to attract.

From there, we had to identify the best channels to engage our Millennial Rationalizer audience. Our research revealed that Millennial Rationalizers are 18% more likely than the average US adult to respond to celebrity endorsements (118 index), 43% more likely to subscribe to Netflix (143 index), 34% more likely to prefer comedic content (134 index), and 39% more likely to watch videos on social apps (139 index). With this in mind, we used a tool called Celebrity Intelligence to identify up-and-coming comedians that a Netflix-viewing, social media obsessed Millennial would be familiar with. We found the

ultimate fit—Iliza Schlesinger who not only over-indexed for our audience but is also herself a Millennial who loves Peet’s.

With Iliza and our audience insights in hand, we then developed a series of comedic video shorts that would feel at home in social media environments, showcase the product, and drive engagement with our Millennial Rationalizer.

Based on the understanding of our Millennial Rationalizer audience and the Better Coffee Indulgence positioning, we developed a creative concept that would empathize with people’s rational intentions of making smart, informed, thoughtful daily choices, balanced by their emotional need to have yummy, fun, treats.

The creative idea became the “Always Justified” campaign – a fun, lighthearted acknowledgment that even the smallest life accomplishments deserve a reward. And when that reward is made better, with all the right ingredients, it’s totally justified.

The goal of the campaign was to give people permission to feel good about indulging their coffee craving. To bring Always Justified to life, we didn’t want to just tell our audience they could feel great about this coffee, we wanted to show them in a way that would grab their attention, entertain them, and leave them wanting more.

As noted above, we found the perfect reflection of our audience – self-described “Elder Millennial” comedian, Iliza Shlesinger. Not only was Iliza’s style of comedy the perfect blend of aspirational wokeness and real world BS, but her sizeable audience perfectly aligned with our Rationalizer.

RESULTS:

With only a spend of $39K, ads that ran across Facebook, Instagram, YouTube pre-roll, and Twitter exceeded all benchmarks for awareness and consideration demonstrating the Iliza content successively engaged Millennial Rationalizers and allowed Peet’s to achieve incremental reach and engagement.

Awareness (Delivery v. Goals):

6.6MM delivered impressions v. 3.7MM goal impressions

CPM 2X more efficient than goal ($5.92 CPM v. $10.36 goal)

Consideration (Delivery v. Goals):

808.6K completed video views v. 668K goal completed video views

28% video completion rate v. 20% goal video completion rate

Video ads drove to a Peet’s Iced Espresso YouTube playlist. Aside from views on ads, there have been an additional 1.2MM views on videos hosted on Peet’s Iced Espresso YouTube playlist. In fact, the time that users have spent watching Iliza videos on this playlist is equivalent to 2.8 years!

So a collaboration with Iliza allowed us to not only generate content geared for our media target, but it brought her diehard fans along for the ride as well. We collaborated closely with Iliza (and her sweetheart pup, Blanche, RIP) to half script, half improv four Always Justified films. The film series follows Iliza through her busy life on the road as she prevails over ridiculous daily challenges and rewards herself with Peet’s Iced Espresso. In the series we see Iliza struggle through an insane wardrobe fitting, fight with a faulty hotel door key card, master a temperamental soundcheck, and beat her own personal record for keeping a telemarketer on the line.