LV is a Finnish skin care product brand. The Sun Care product line was launched in 2017 and had gained a market share of almost 30 %. The sun lotion product category is very competitive with a few well-established and positioned brands. Big variations in the weather create unique challenges for marketing, media use and budgeting.

The Sun Care line had a limited budget.

However the objective remained: "Help Finns protect their skin from the sun's harmful radiation in time and prevent skin diseases such as skin cancer, in the long run."

The operational objectives were set as follows:

a. Sales growth compared to 2019 = 0 %

b. Return on investment = 100 %

c. Advertising CTR is better than market category average.

We took clinical research data, search behavior, real-time radiation measurements and location data and used the insight we gained to design a conditions-based marketing concept, in order to maximize our reach with a small budget.

The key implementation was the simplified sundial and the desire to serve it precisely at the right time, location and channel with best placements.

Our formula was: condition + location + time = need + sales

Knowing that > 60 % of our webiste traffic came from Google search and that >70 % of our visitors use mobile devices, we chose accelerated HTML-ads in 6 most popular placements only.

We integrated the UV radiation forecast data from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration through a SaaS on top of our ad platforms to automatically control the advertising based on radiation forecasts and current conditions.

We studied how people search for information about UV radiation, sun care products and sunburn. We combined this with sales figures and with hourly radiation observations from the Finnish Meteorological Institute.

We noticed that changes only occured at UVI = 5 with a 3–7 day lead time if the. We demonstrated a significant correlation between purchase behavior and UVI. The pattern match told us that people buy sun care products too late and only when it's too hot. This opened the possibility for us to nudge the purchase to the day before burning.

With a broad target group, all at risk, we needed to be smart about the budget. We chose to put a service layer on top of our ads that would serve ads only when all conditions were met and otherwise keep the off. We chose only the most popular ad formats to increase effectiveness.

During the campaign period from June 6th to July 31st, sales of LV Sun Care products grew more than 30 % overall, with a 236 % growth during sunny days. Intelligent on and off toggling of ads in accordance with UV radiation levels decreased the cost of display advertising by 75 % compared to previous campaigns.

In July, when there were more rainy days, campaign spend dropped 62 %. Savings compared to regular 24/7 campaign was 67 % less spend on total.

The campaign got over 4 million impressions.

The sales peaks moved in the right direction – we generated more purchases on sunny days or before sunny days compared to the previous year.