Building brand awareness with AMC and Fire TV

The challenge

Earth Month presented General Mills with a high-impact moment to elevate its sustainability-led brands - Nature Valley, LARABAR, EPIC, and Annie's - in front of environmentally conscious consumers. But making that connection meaningful required more than brand values alone; it demanded a campaign that could seamlessly merge purpose-driven storytelling with full-funnel performance measurement. To deliver on that ambition, the team faced three critical challenges:

• How to translate cause-based messaging into quantifiable ROI
• How to reach and influence both new and existing shoppers across media formats
• How to allocate budget efficiently across Fire TV, Amazon DSP, and Sponsored Ads.

Without unified visibility into shopper journeys and campaign sequencing, tailoring creative or optimizing spend would be guesswork. To execute with confidence, General Mills needed a platform that could unify data, creative strategy, and media delivery - ensuring every impression contributed to both brand equity and bottom-line results.

The solution

In a first-of-its-kind activation, General Mills partnered with Stackline and VMLY&R Commerce to launch Press Play for Nature - a cause-driven campaign on Fire TV that invited consumers to stream nature content during Earth Month. For every hour viewed, General Mills pledged $1 to the National Park Foundation, reaching a $100,000 donation cap while amplifying brand values in a moment that mattered. Behind the scenes, the campaign was powered by a full-funnel media strategy orchestrated through Stackline's AMC-powered intelligence and anchored in Atlas, the centralized platform for audience management and omnichannel measurement. Atlas allowed the team to coordinate insights from Amazon Marketing Cloud, optimize sequencing logic, and unify performance data across media layers.

By layering Fire TV with Sponsored Brands and Amazon DSP, the team created a sequenced customer journey that aligned emotional engagement with measurable purchase intent. AMC analysis revealed that shoppers exposed to all three touchpoints were 203% more likely to convert, uncovering the precise path to performance. Beacon played a pivotal role throughout the campaign, surfacing real-time performance insights and trend signals across creative, audience, and bidding strategies.

These early signals enabled the team to maintain campaign momentum, tune frequency, and sustain message impact throughout Earth Month. Additionally, General Mills collaborated closely with Stackline's Professional Services team to tailor AMC queries, design optimal channel sequencing, and implement mid-campaign optimizations that maximized both philanthropic and commercial outcomes.

This hands-on partnership was instrumental in transforming a brand moment into a business win. The result: Press Play for Nature not only maxed out charitable contributions but also delivered General Mills' highest-grossing Amazon sales week to date - with a 47% boost in net sales and over 102,000 hours of streamed content. This campaign proved that purpose-led storytelling, when paired with data-driven precision, can unlock exponential brand and business impact.