Digital advertising lets marketers and advertisers reach the target audience in more precise ways. According to Salesforce, the annual growth of digital advertising is 20%. The reason behind this continued growth is programmatic – reach the right person at the right time in the right context by using audience data and technology. If programmatic advertising is done well, brands can benefit from the desired effect of relevant and timely content. We’ve lead in the basics of programmatic advertising with one of our previous articles. Let’s look at five examples that drive successful programmatic ad campaigns. I believe they would inspire you!
1. The Economist
The Economist is the winner of Best Programmatic or Performance Marketing Campaign at the 2015 Masters of Marketing Awards. Let’s see what made it the winner.
It wanted to reach 650,000 previously unseen prospects and to stimulate a change in perceptions. The position of The Economist as a differential for white-collar workers resulted in refuse some liberal potential readers who are reluctant to try The Economist. Attracting their interest began with content and headlines containing wit and humor. To achieve this, the web/app usage of subscribers were analyzed to identify the best Economist content and align target cookie data against seven segments (finance, politics, economics, doing good, careers, technology and social justice).
Page context and viewer profile built in real time, matching page context and viewer profile to the Economist feed (thousands of articles, infographics, and reports) before serving an appropriate ad. The goal was to hit the right people in the right context. More than 60 executions were created, many in near real-time from the company’s live newsroom.
The results of this programmatic creative push were 650,000 new prospects, 3.6m people taking action, and a campaign ROI of 10:1, on a £1.2m media budget.
Moreover, in the U.S., where The Economist is less well-known, ‘awareness’ jumped 64%, ‘consideration’ rose by 22% and ‘willingness to recommend’ rose 10%.
2. O2
Telecom firm O2 wanted to promote “tariff refresh” TV ad as a programmatic campaign for mobile users. So, it repurposed the TV ad for mobile video ads by making it relevant and engaging for a mobile audience. By referencing the user data such as device and location, it offered users specific messages based on that profile. O2 could suggest mobile users the current recycling value of their phone, the offers for an upgrade, what people “like them” generally preferred upgrading to, and where their nearest outlet was.
More than 1,000 versions of the video ad were created integrated in real-time with the user’s device and location. And the programmatic advertising achieved 128% increase in click-through rate over generic video.
3. AirAsia
AirAsia conducted its campaign on Facebook to uphold confidence in the AirAsia brand. It is because The AirAsia group has had a troubled history of technical failures and human error since the crash in 2014.
It segmented users in three ways;
- Those who bought an AirAsia ticket previously, but not after the crash
- Those who bought a ticket after the incident
- High-value AirAsia advocates (regular customers)
Each group was targeted with different creative. The first group saw ads reasonable rates for routes they had flown before, the second group saw an information about routes that they have searched before and the last group were targeted with brand advertising, including video.
According to results, the campaign generated 30x return on ad spend with its own CRM data and with 20% of video viewers watching the entire video.
4. ScS
Home furnishing retailer ScS used programmatic advertising to deliver location-based messaging and product offers on social platforms such as Facebook and YouTube. It brought various data such as web analytics, store visitor and search together to target customers while most likely to visit their local store.
The company worked with search agency, Epiphany, while data was supplied by Media IQ and Google Analytics web traffic data, store visitor data and the ScS internal sales database. Also, it worked with tech firm Zapp360 to run a scrolling ticker-tape-style text ad unit at the bottom of device screens. By combining these data with GPS, customers were targeted according to the location including on their mobile devices.
The campaign resulted in 57% increase in store footfall during March and June in 2016 compared with the same period the previous year.
5. Amanda Foundation
The last example belongs to Amanda Foundation, a nonprofit that rescues dogs and cats spending their last days in Los Angeles city and county shelters. It was aimed to find perfect pet-owner matches. The campaign was developed by Saatchi & Saatchi L.A. Each ad was tailored to a user depending on their previous browsing behavior and demographics. For example, someone appeared to be athletic, it would be sent to an active breed like pit-bull or an eager person would be sent an ad featuring a cat.
“The world’s first pet adoption drive that is driven through programmatic media matched up with creative,” said Chris Pierantozzi, a creative director at Saatchi L.A.