Wilson, Canada’s top insect repellent brand, leads sales with 28% of market shares. However, its main competitor, Ortho, isn’t far behind with 27%. Wilson needed to outsmart competition with an innovative approach that would disrupt the category, as well as maintaining 2020 sales levels, considering the uncertainty of another COVID year.

Nothing is as stressful nor as traumatizing as discovering a family of big, dark, hairy insects right in the middle of your living room. When an insect invasion occurs, consumers panic and default to searching online for quick solutions. They are spurred to action within the next 48 hours despite not knowing
which product to buy.

They will usually Google “big dark, hairy, insect with 6 legs” or “crawling, long centipedes” hoping to identify the intruder and learn how to get rid of it. Unfortunately, this can be difficult as there are more than 55 000 species of insects in Canada and more than 150 different products to choose from.

The hundreds of different products are even more confusing for the consumer as they lack differentiation from one brand to another. Every pest control product has a similar packaging as this blurs the consumer’s decision making in a moment where they are over-stressed.

Worst of all, insect invasions are unpredictable events! People can't anticipate when tiny invaders will enter their beloved home, and their anxiety levels go to the roof when it happens. Knowing that, Wilson saw an opportunity to be top of mind in consumers’ heads before they even knew they needed the product.

Wilson built a solid data ecosystem that would become the basis of trust with their consumers: allowing them to predict anxiety-provoking invasions that they couldn’t plan before. Historical and real-time data were analyzed to share valuable information with Canadians and help them identify the specific product they need before an insect invades their home. With a 3-step strategy, they connected their media channels to several data points so that their communications would be as relevant as possible to the consumer.

The experts at Wilson helped us identify which insects were more prone to infest according to the different weather triggers: temperature, humidity, geography, and seasonality. By gathering all the data on the most common insects and rodents, they determined an exhaustive list of conditions that cause their proliferation.

Based on consumer research and trends, the agency was able to map the most infected neighborhoods across Canada. They created a first-to-market audience targeting connecting with people based on an extrapolation at the scale of the postal code (FSA) they live in. Banners were activated based on infected FSA to push the best product solution to their pest problem. 1450 FSA were targeted in a country of only 1600. Moreover, the FSA data were integrated into search ads to personalize text ads based on the user location, redirecting them to the closest resellers.

They capitalized on building a strong partnership with The Weather Network, Canada’s leader in location-based data. They collectively developed a prospecting tactic, connected to multiple data points to deliver a customized programmatic ad, based on the level of infestation risk depending on the weather triggers identified previously. As such, the message combinations were almost limitless – for each
weather trigger can be matched with a Wilson product. 1 million customized ads were delivered across
Canada. Those combinations happened in real time.

Thanks to an efficient data strategy and an innovative partnership with The Weather Network, Wilson
has been able to educate Canadians on possible insect invasions and give them the tools to
prevent these traumatic events.

They recorded a global sales increase of 2.5% in the pest control category. A great surprise considering that they anticipated flat results year-over-year due to uncertainties related to COVID. They reached a high level of engagement on all creatives: they outperformed with click through rates (0.75%), which is more than double The Weather Network’s benchmarks (0.30%). Some of their creatives even got up to 5 times over the anticipated results (2.22% CTR).

Wilson became Canadians’ insect invasion saviour by building a solution to help Canadians
predict the unpredictable!