NEW YORK ? A Nestlé executive at ad:tech New York 2013 said that the recent Kit Kat Android partnership was one example of how the CPG brand leveraged different platforms and touch points to engage consumers.

During the ?Digital transformation the Nestlé way? session the executive laid out four different pillars of Nestle and gave examples of different success stories. The Kit Kat Android partnership, for example, generated more than 1.3 billion Twitter impressions and two million views on YouTube within 72 hours.

?There was a very big thing around the paid earned optimization and there was a thing around how do you leverage the platforms to really create a different type of marketing,? said Pete Blackshaw, global head of digital and social media at Nestlé, Vevey, Switzerland.

?No money exchanged hands, and it really underscores the power of owned media,? he said. ?The packaging provided value. It?s about thinking about your assets as you try to build your brand franchises.?

Leveraging brand assets
Nestlé sells 1.2 billion products a day, and Mr. Blackshaw explained that the brand understands the opportunity available for digitizing these products.

A number of Nestlé products have QR codes linking a consumer to a site with more information about the product.

One ice cream product, Eskimo Monkey, leverages the stick of the ice cream to include codes that consumers can redeem in online games.

Nestlé's Fitness cereal brand took this concept of digitizing physical products even further in a partnership with a breast cancer prevention campaign.

The cereal brand launched a Twitter bra that tweeted when a consumer unlocked her bra. The tweet was meant to remind her to do her monthly breast check.

For Nestlé, it is about leveraging brands? assets to maximize earned media off of paid media.

In the Kit Kat Android partnership, no money was exchanged, and Nestlé took advantage of its chocolate brand?s wrappers to increase marketing efforts.

On Sept. 3, Google named Android 4.4 after Nestle?s Kit Kat chocolate bar, continuing Google?s pattern of naming its Android products after food in alphabetical order (see story).

Forty-eight minutes after announcing the partnership on Sept. 3, Nestlé saw a quick burst on Twitter. Kit Kat was trending on Twitter, peaking at No. 1 and staying in the top 10 for more than 12 hours.

Additionally, the Kit Kat site?s traffic grew by more than 80,000 percent.

Leading the way
Mr. Blackshaw listed four different fundamentals that Nestlé embraces to make itself a leader in the digital marketing world: Embracing fundamentals, media productivity, external focus and innovation and inspiring and rapid scaling.

With 80 million followers of Facebook, Nestlé tries to scale community management and operationalize it to respond to consumer expectation of engagement.

Nestlé works on being responsive to its consumers while innovating in the digital sphere. That is why Nestlé created the digital acceleration team, which gathers its best employees to innovate and experiment.

?Listening has always been central to branding, but digital takes it to a new level,? Mr. Blackshaw said. ?It?s just embracing the core fundamentals.

?With digital, we kept it really simple,? he said. ?From those fundamentals we saw three pillars of our digital leadership ? listening, engaging and inspiring and transforming.

?We need to generate excitement, but it can flame out really fast.?

Final Take
Rebecca Borison is editorial assistant on Mobile Marketer, New York