How two food brands used Gen AI to precisely target customer needs, using Pencil’s Insights tool

Pencil’s Insights tool helps marketers pinpoint audience mindsets, preferences and lifestyles:

There are countless factors consumers might consider when choosing food: how does it taste, is there added sugar, is it vegan, is it gut-friendly? Is it indulgent or energizing? Is this me treating myself or looking after my health? An ad can’t cover everything - so brands need to pinpoint what matters most to a customer in a given moment. It’s no use shouting about low sugar in a pizza if the thing customers really care about is the amount of toppings. 

Brands need to hit on specific, relatable moments in a customer’s life. A cereal bar brand needs to catch people on their morning commute, when they’re looking for a quick snack to set them up for the day. A protein powder brand needs to understand a customer’s workout habits, and how they want to feel post-workout. Understanding these scenarios allows marketers to develop messaging that resonates. Gen AI has given us a new opportunity to tailor narratives for different moments, getting to the heart of a customer’s mindset.

Brands often assume they know what consumers want, but Gen AI provides the data-driven insights needed to align messaging with genuine consumer interests.

Pencil’s Insights tool allows you to segment audiences and learn about them in detail. You can segment audiences with the Audience Personas tool, or use the Cultural Insights tool to dig into customer values, behaviors, and social norms. The tool gives you a much deeper comprehension of a potential customer’s actions, preferences and responses to particular foods. When you generate content with the Audience Personas or Cultural Insights tools, the AI uses a combination of its own training data, and the information you upload (such as your brand guidelines or product details).

Once you’ve generated a set of personas or insights through Pencil, you can prompt the AI to create content based on those insights: 

Below are two examples of how brands used the Insights tool to create higher performing ads.

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Example 1: Creating ads that speak to customer pain points

A yogurt brand working with Pencil used the Insights tool to draw out customer motivations and pain points related to food. They found that customers were particularly concerned about gut health and bloating, which allowed them to create a campaign aimed at alleviating some of those worries. The campaign had two aims, a) drive adoption of a healthy habit to eat two of their yogurts a day, and b) create informative content around gut health. 

To establish the habit among customers, the brand decided to create a two week gut health challenge as a concrete call to action. Given that new habits are more likely to stick when anchored to existing ones, the challenge encouraged customers to incorporate the yogurt into their daily breakfast routine. By linking the product to a familiar ritual, the brand made it easier for customers to adopt the new habit.

Using Pencil, it took one hour to create a campaign visual that focused on the pain point (bloating) and introduced the 14-day challenge. The brand further personalized the campaign by exploring local food pairings across five target countries, tailoring messaging to resonate with specific groups in each location, including translating copy where necessary. Their key channels were social, ecommerce and POS, so they created assets for Instagram reels, shopper/POS formats and programmatic banners. Instagram reels for the Italian market took around 11 hours, the POS formats took around 30 mins and the programmatic banner edits took just 15 minutes.

Key Takeaways:

• Identified customer pain points using Pencil’s Insights tool
• Created a campaign visual in one hour
• Localized content, including translation
• Delivered assets for social, e-commerce and POS

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Example 2: Creating ads for distinct audience segments

A brand selling ranch dressing used Pencil’s Insights tool to develop detailed personas, and identify the settings, food pairings, and storylines most relevant to each audience.

The brand decided to connect with three distinct audience segments: the general condiments user, the solo snacker, and the group snacker. For the solo snacker, they designed ads around a late-night gaming scene with pizza bites and ranch, while for the group snacker, the setting was a casual gathering with friends enjoying mozzarella sticks dipped in ranch. Each scenario captured the real-life contexts in which customers would actually use their products.

By combining precise, persona-focused copy with on-brand imagery, the brand created ads that felt authentic, even down to lifelike details like tableware and ranch texture. These tailored ads connected strongly with each target group, and each asset was created in just 42 minutes.

The brand was able to:

• Developed precise audiences personas using Pencil’s Insights tool
• Created food pairings and scenarios tailored for each audience
• Created each asset in 42 minutes

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In a world filled with choices, it’s the brands that listen and respond with precision that will thrive:

Pencil’s Insights tool lets you tap directly into the everyday experiences of your customers. Not only that, the efficiency of Gen AI has made it possible to develop tailored campaigns for every key audience, scenario and trend. It’s now feasible to build and deploy highly-relatable ad variations at scale.

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