Written Explanation

Putting America’s National Parks into reach, right in people’s pockets.

Nature Valley created a first-of-its kind, digital, commerce-enabled brand experience leveraging a historic United States Mint initiative: The America the Beautiful quarters collection. This unexpected partnership turned americans everyday money pieces into savings on a favorite snack brand and outdoor adventures at 56 of America’s National Parks.

Background

The U.S. National Parks:

With endless natural beauty, unique geological features, diverse ecosystems, and recreation. Despite being accessible to millions, in 2022, Park attendance was down 25%

No outdoor adventure meant no Nature Valley:
The first on-the-go granola bar to be introduced to Americans, made to be eaten outside, needed more consumers. Despite being a go-to snack for many years, the brand was seeing consumption declines and losing relevancy. Their long existing partnership with The National Parks was prime to help Americans learn more about and spend more time in nature while eating more Nature Valley.

The "America the Beautiful" Quarters:
Launched in 2012, these 25c pieces (19 billion in circulation) commemorating the parks, that the U.S. Mint had already produced, were effectively 10 years’ worth of potential coupons. Already in millions of peoples’ pockets, Nature Valley just needed to set up the rewards.

Creative idea

Adventure Quarters.

A retail experience that turned 19 billion coins into Parks passes and Nature Valley product discounts. Raising awareness and encouraging Americans to support America’s National Parks.

Just go to adventurequarters.com, scan any special edition America the Beautiful quarter, and see it come to life; Learn about the National Parks and win a National Park pass to promote tourism and conservation.

Consumers also get a quarter discount (25%) on their favorite Nature Valley products. Meanwhile, Nature Valley planned a donation to the National Parks Foundation to protect the Parks experience for future generations of visitors.

Strategy

Bring the best of nature out, with every scan and every bite.

To bring Nature Valley and the U.S. Mint’s existing initiative into focus, Nature Valley teamed up with respected and well-known brands that could help get more Americans into The National Parks – the National Parks Service (nature advocate) and The Kroger Company (U.S. food retailer). Both brands also cater to Nature Valley’s target consumer, The Balance Creator. Balance Creators prioritize engaging in experiences that feed their families sense of wonder and love spending time together in nature. They seek out ways to create more time to do what they love which meant shopping for food differently, leveraging ecommerce efficiencies and digital forms of payment. With focus away from physical shopping and COVID-19 spurred currency shortages, so many of the U.S.Mint’s 19 billion America the Beautiful quarters were left sitting unused in jars at home.

Execution

We emptied our pockets and dug through our couches to amass a collection of spare change. We combined this with a complete set of America The Beautiful Quarters, mixed everything up, and took several hundred pictures of the pile. From there, we painstakingly labeled over 1,100 images of national park quarters, then used the dataset to train a TensorFlow machine learning model. The model was deployed with a web application that allowed users to scan their quarters and enter in program without installing an app.

At Adventurequarters.com, consumers engaged with an interactive map of the Parks with information and a link to learn more and plan a visit. Surround media consisting of 11 separate touchpoints ranging from TV retargeting, to paid social, to influencers, and animated display, drove consumers to the site.

Tight collaboration resulted in the AI-technology build and strategic plan being executed in a mere two months’ timeframe.

Results

In less than one month, Nature Valley is approaching 6:1 ROI while creating tens of thousands of new nature advocates.

The campaign has been active since April 1, 2022, and media has already driven 15,000 unique visits to adventurequarters.com, with an overall 31MM total impressions.

On average, consumers are spending 7x more time on adventurequarters.com than the media benchmark, and all performance metrics are meeting or exceeding benchmarks across mobile offsite, paid social, and email.

Social media influencers are experiencing strong click through rates with 100,000 engagements to date on 26 pieces of content.

Over the first two weeks of the campaign alone, Nature Valley saw a +28% dollar sales lift at Kroger stores versus year-ago, approaching a 6:1 ROI.

Nature Valley has also committed a donation of $15,000 to the National Parks Services for restoration and preservation of America’s Parks for generations of Balance Creators to come.