Nature’s Path and boa use Media Reporting to merge sustainability and performance on social

Nature’s Path is North America’s largest certified organic breakfast and snack food company. On a mission to “leave the Earth better than we found it,” the company was keen to walk the walk in all areas of its business.

Through ongoing conversations with its agency, boa, the Nature’s Path marketing team realized an opportunity to incorporate sustainability into their social advertising strategy — a key component for growing its brand presence.

By partnering with boa and Scope3, Nature's Path not only reduced campaign emissions but also transformed its social media strategy for long-term sustainable growth.

The challenge: decarbonize a social campaign without jeopardizing performance

Social media is a big piece of the Nature’s Path marketing strategy, with Meta being a key strategy to expand digital reach and get in front of their desired audience. As boa helped the company execute campaigns across Facebook and Instagram, it was clear that Meta’s automated tools, designed to serve a wide range of advertisers regardless of size or goals, didn’t always align with Nature’s Path’s complex brand KPIs.

For example, the algorithm favored small banner units over large placements, which, while lower cost and more carbon efficient, did not provide brand impact. Plus, boa noticed rising emissions year-over-year, due in part to the platform’s investment in AI (which is happening across all major platforms), making it more difficult to hit reduction targets.

boa saw an opportunity to employ a nuanced, long-term strategy that could satisfy both client goals: lowering carbon emissions and improving campaign performance.

The solution: hands-on testing and granular reporting

Wanting a more holistic view of how the platform interprets each data input, boa suggested and implemented a formal A/B test comparing manual placements against the algorithm. Tapping into Scope3’s Media Reporting tool, boa easily measured the carbon emissions of each strategy.

The test and learn approach allowed boa to evaluate ad size and audience against a “carbon intensity per result” metric.

The results: lower emissions, higher reach, and more impactful ad placements

By tapping into Scope3’s rich Media Reporting dashboard, boa was able to buy more impactful ad placements without growing emissions, meeting its goal of balancing performance with carbon efficiency.

Here are some key results:

• Better performance, less waste. Using Scope3 emissions data, boa proved that environmental responsibility and media effectiveness can go hand in hand, driving 62% lower carbon intensity per result while also while also seeing a 47% increase in clicks and 44% increase in landing page views year-over-year.
• Increased reach. boa focused on more precise geographic and audience segmentation with mutually distinct personas, achieving a 39% year-over-year increase in reach.
• More impactful ad placements. Manual targeting allowed boa to evaluate individual ad placements. Within one week of starting the campaign, boa removed an entire segment of inventory on the platform due to budget inefficiency and reallocated spend to more impactful ad formats and placements.

“Every purchasing decision we make has an impact on the planet and all living on it. By showing that sustainable media buying can deliver superior results, we’re proving that businesses don’t have to choose between effectiveness and environmental responsibility.” — Avril Tomlin-Hood, boa, Founder & CEO

Key learnings for brands and agencies

Nature’s Path and boa’s success in improving media effectiveness and slashing emissions with Scope3 offers three key insights for brands looking to minimize waste, both financial and carbon, in their digital campaigns.

• Emissions data alone isn’t enough. boa found that while smaller banners were lower carbon options, they did not drive brand KPIs. By combining performance and emissions data in Scope3's Media Reporting, buyers can make better decisions and optimize across key KPIs to eliminate waste, lower emissions and make their media more effective.
• Social media can align with social responsibility. Reaching audiences on key platforms can be done in smarter and more sustainable ways. Using precision targeting alongside Scope3 emissions data can drive marketing efficiency, highlighting one way for a brand’s marketing practices to align with its core values.
• A holistic, hands-on approach is needed to drive results. Total automation in campaign management can risk prioritizing one KPI to the detriment of all others. A better way is to strategically test optimizations in order to validate targeting and placement specifications, providing actionable optimizations that inform better marketing strategy. Partners with plug-and-play integrations like Scope3 make these processes easy to identify and implement.

Get in touch with us via the form below to learn more about how you can optimize campaigns for both carbon emissions and performance. Additionally, explore more ways to optimize your social campaigns via Brand Standards — our new product that provides bespoke brand suitability filtering, available now on Meta.