The Challenge

When Doves Farm Foods launched its new FREEE Chocolate and Swiss Style Muesli, the brand faced a classic industry challenge: navigating highly fragmented consumer groups across multiple digital environments without oversaturating their audience or diluting critical performance data. FREEE brought a brief to our team requiring a connected media solution that could transition them away from generic brand messaging towards a sophisticated, strategic framework.

The primary business goal was to accurately identify core high-value groups, lower audience acquisition costs, and cost-effectively scale unique reach across both Meta and TikTok platforms. Ultimately, we needed to design a targeted marketing campaign that could convert initial top-of-funnel brand awareness into sustained mid-funnel momentum, successfully driving meaningful business growth and significantly increasing digital web shop traffic during a critical promotional period.

The Solution

To address this brief, the Fifty team deployed proprietary audience intelligence platform to analyse large-scale behavioural signals and digital connections, building a completely custom set of  audience segments called Tribes, tailored specifically to the brand. This advanced strategy isolated core target groups, such as a specialised gluten-free cluster and animal advocates, rather than relying on standard off-the-shelf definitions.

The team enriched these insights with OCEAN personality profile data to map behavioural and psychological traits, to inform and enable highly personalised messaging tailored to the custom audience mindsets. 

On Meta, high-performing segments were grouped into a unified cluster to scale the budget efficiently, while lookalike audiences were built off pixel-based retargeting to unlock larger groups at a lower cost per thousand (CPM) impressions. Across TikTok, we conducted rigorous channel testing alongside specific age demographic filters; conscious that the platform naturally skews delivery to a younger 18–24 demographic, we dynamically adjusted our parameters mid-campaign to pinpoint optimal engagement tiers and streamline ad delivery.

Finally, the team optimised the media strategy by introducing product-centric creative variations, pairing rich lifestyle food photography with explicit discount frames, which provided critical learnings on performance drivers across short-form video placements. This process ensured that high-efficiency retargeting functioned seamlessly across channels to maintain quality engagement. 

We also test user-generated content (UGC)-style assets, providing valuable learnings around the importance of matching creators to the key age demographic we’re targeting, allowing the team to optimise future campaigns by featuring more older creators rather than the younger creators in the ads.

Testimonial

We’ve  partnered with Fifty since 2024 because they consistently deliver measurable impact and have become a trusted strategic media partner. Their deep understanding of audiences, creative performance and channel nuances has helped us identify our core ‘Freee Cluster’ audience and uncover valuable learnings to shape future activity. On our Muesli launch, Fifty’s expertise in testing new channels and formats provided actionable audience insights, while their full-funnel approach helped us surpass site traffic targets by 46% and drive sustained online sales. They’ve become a trusted media partner in helping us grow brand engagement and reach new customers.

Thomas Barkholt Head of Marketing, Doves Farm

The Results 

The collaboration delivered outstanding business impact, successfully capturing high-intent breakfast shoppers and driving a massive spike in web shop traffic that peaked at over 1,500 daily sessions compared to a sub-250 baseline. The multi-platform activation completely surpassed its original targets, delivering 29.5 million impressions on Meta and an additional 11.5 million impressions on TikTok. 

By actively managing demographics and excluding the younger audience segment mid-campaign, the team successfully sustained an elevated baseline of 500 daily sessions throughout June even after the promotional discount concluded. 

Creative diversity proved highly effective, boosting click-through rates campaign-on-campaign and generating 31,704 total clicks on Meta at an average cost-per-click of just £0.16. This approach proved that data-driven audience insights successfully keep products top-of-mind and drive consistent organic site exploration.