In 2014 Beech-Nut baby food launched a new line of all-natural baby food called Just, a name reflecting the simplicity of their all-natural ingredients like whole fruits and vegetables. Beech-Nut knew they had a great product that moms would love, but they needed to raise awareness and and quickly demonstrate that their new way of preparing food for babies represented a big change in industry thinking.

SwellShark realized that television’s reach would be very valuable for Beech-Nut because of the size of the audience that would be receptive to the new “Just” food line. Still, without a blockbuster budget, we needed to maximize the influence and impact of our television investment. We realized that shows with a built-in trust and recommendation factor could do just that.

As Mother’s Day was approaching, we identified Ellen’s annual Mother’s Day show as the right placement. This annual show reaches nearly 3.5 million viewers and showcases a handful of brands she is personally involved in promoting. Ellen gave her audience and spoke about Beech-Nut on her Mother’s day show. Furthermore, a week later she did a “live commercial” for Beech-Nut. In both instances, we helped Beech-Nut secure the first spot immediately following Ellen’s live segment to air their new commercial.

To further extend the impact of the TV investment, we also timed promoted Tweets to match up with the episodes, generating over a million impressions and 40,000 engagements. Brand mentions on Twitter were up 252% and we gained many new fans.

The Ellen segments, TV spot placements, and Twitter promotions had exactly the kind of outsized impact we wanted to find for Beech-Nut. On the day of the “live commercial” on Ellen, Beech-Nut’s website traffic was the highest it had ever been, and more moms than ever before were able to learn about the new “Just” line.