In Thailand, the purchasing behavior for telco services happened as needs arose – be it an upgrade in talk time, or more data for the month. They were seldom committed-to upon signing a mobile plan.

This meant that dtac needed to know each user’s current mobile-related need state, and give them an immediate benefit. Only then would we be able to upsell our further services to them.

To understand how each person in our database used their mobile phone, we engaged Google as our strategic partner. Google was the technical powerhouse which tapped dtac’s rich CRM database and identified usage patterns, so that we could serve ads with only the most relevant messaging for each individual, based on their need state at that moment in time. Through this dynamic profiling process, we found individuals with the highest propensity to convert or upgrade, from our already robust database.

Now that we had a huge list of segmented consumers, our challenge was to identify them online. In order to do that, we used cookies, which had earlier been dropped when a user visited dtac’s website. Each cookie acted as a unique identifier that this particular phone belonged to a particular person.

With the use of DoubleClick technology and programmatic targeting, we then matched cookies with encrypted CRM IDs. So when that user browsed online later on, we showed user-targeted promotions based on real-time integrations of the systems. We deployed over a hundred different creative visuals, providing hyper-relevant messaging with an instant call to action.

For instance, if a user was about to hit their data package limit, we would serve them a data top-up ad. If a user was identified as a heavy phone user, the system would show them an upgraded voice package. All this in real time.

Within one month, 1,000,000 mobile ad impressions were served to dtac users; 4,000 banner clicks were generated. dtac’s average conversion rate was 0.5%; but this campaign returned as much as 5%. This Asia-first idea delivered 10 times higher conversions in online transactions than any other performance campaign ever run by dtac, which was already the market leader in Thailand.

More importantly, this single campaign allowed us to create a more robust database for dtac. Our real-time targeting and continuous monitoring of consumer behavior continues to populate this database, and all remarketing efforts have now become more efficient with lower media wastage, and higher conversions than ever.