Over the past 5 years the UK breakfast cereal market has seen continual growth and has increased in size by 17%. In 2007 it was estimated to be worth £1.28billion and carries with it a reputation for being able to evolve to meet consumer demand. However, the major brands in this market are aware that in order to sustain growth, they must both increase frequency of consumption and attract new consumers. Between May 2006 and January 2007, Weetabix ran four highly intensive bursts of their 'Weetabix Week' TV campaign.The TV campaign ran on all major commercial TV channels.

The objective was to evaluate the effectivness of the TV campaign using SkyView's panel of 33,000 homes.

Weetabix set out to gain a deeper understanding of the campaign's effectiveness - the kind of understanding that could be used to make future media deployment more effective. SkyView was identified as the research tool that could yield those kind of learnings. SkyView is a panel of 33,000 Sky homes that have their TV viewing constantly monitored via their set-top boxes. 7,000 of these homes are also on the TNS Worldpanel and have their weekly FMCG purchasing records captured. Combined, this generates a powerful and truly unique single source of viewing and purchasing data.

The campaign generated a very healthy sales uplift of 10.8% for the core brand. This compares very favourably with other FMCG brands - the average uplift being 5.2% from 4 weeks of continuous activity. 54% of incremental sales for Weetabix came within 7 days of viewing ad. However, a significant proportion of sales effects still occurred 28 days after ad exposure. SkyView shows that the TV campaign attracted a wide range of buyers, both young and old. Most importantly for Weetabix, the advertising prompted new and lapsed buyers back to the brand.

The single source methodology of SkyView allowed Weetabix, for the first time, to assess the effectiveness of their advertising amongst actual viewers of the TV campaign. The research findings not only helped to confirm the efficacy of Walker Media's planning strategy but also would become one of the key components in the future planning and buying of Weetabix campaigns. In fact, the 'Weetabix Week' has returned to our screens twice since the research, with SkyView continuing to be part of the process.