With over half a billion internet users in India, the need for driving business growth from digital is higher than ever. But the walled-garden digital world poses challenges & disrupts/restricts customised targeting, as audience information exists only in the form of black box algorithms on large publisher ecosystems & does not get passed back to advertisers. This leads to misinformed media planning assumptions.

Unilever India operationalises 150+ digital campaigns across Categories X Brands/month, there is clear need for our brands to identify their most valuable audiences and engage with them in a meaningful way that drives salience & leads to increase in penetration.

Thus, the need of the hour was to device a data led media deployment model that aims to deliver brand growth by delivering Reach, Frequency, Continuity and Relevance at scale by leveraging 1st party Data, Programmatic Stack and Digital Partnerships

Traditional consumer data acquisitions approaches are often expensive, and have dated consumer context. For FMCG brands, the best form of consumer data is one that signals the users’ current interests and purchase intent.

Our key task thus, to ‘find the most valuable brand consumers’ with intent signals, who we could target, re-target & move upwards in the consumer journey (Awareness-Consideration-Purchase) across digital touchpoints.

So, we launched the Maxima Data Lab with a mission to consistently and continuously acquire and organize actionable data on consumers at scale. Given that we run hundreds of paid media campaigns every month, all our digital ads were made Interactive-Clickable and Shoppable. This delivers engaging experiences that combine-product discovery for our users, while enabling us to acquire first party audience data. For example, events like completed video views signal interest or visit to product pages signal purchase intent (in a category/brand/variant/topic).

Our target audience comprises of Maxima Data Lab’s, 100+ million personally addressable virtual consumer profiles, this enables informed data driven targeting

The planning principle is to maximise reach in an intent audience segment with relevant communication at an effective frequency, continuously month after month, to maintain salience & drive penetration through sharper targeting. Leveraging first party (Maxima) data improves our ability to reach the same audiences by a factor of 20 over a 3-month period. All brands within the Unilever ecosystem follow this deployment principle for their digital plans.

Our approach is to keep expanding this pool of intent audience every single month with newer consumers coming into the fold, making the core audience pool more robust & rich. With more brand adoptions, new communications and cross pollination of audience between brands, we aim to widen the pool over a period to specifically target intent audience

Deploy (shoppable) brand videos -> Capture intent audience pool -> Widen Pool by cross tabulating audience sets within Unilever -> Create lookalike audience pool with Partners-> Setup Campaigns-Ad Groups to programmatically Remarket to the intent audience continuously. This model- Measure| Improve| Repeat

We established foundational capabilities for Maxima Data Lab along with partners:

1. Media Platform Integration: Real time view of brand audiences and campaign performance (reach, frequency and quality metrics). Achieved via API integrations with Google, Facebook, Moat and other platforms.

2. e-Commerce Integration: Real time view of product availability, pricing and discounts across key e-Commerce sites-this helps us add a meaningful path to purchase on all our digital assets.

(Major Partners-Facebook, Google, Daily Hunt, InMobi, 27 Unilever Websites, e-commerce, etc.)

2018, Maxima Data Lab powered 1000+ campaigns, delivered 25+ billion ad impressions, reaching over 100 million users every month. (This model is repeatable, evolutionary, scalable & enables precision)

Unilever’s digital deployment through ‘Maxima Data Lab’ has resulted in significant impact on efficiency and effectiveness & business growth (what really matters!)

Precision marketing at scale:

Consistent monthly Reach within sharper audience lead to

1. 90% reach improvement at effective frequency, with 3.5% lower cost vs. Demo Targeting

3. 2X uplift in Ad Awareness by using Maxima audience vs. demographic targeting

4. 3X increase in engagement and sell through- CTRs, Ad activated traffic Conversions, Shares & Likes

Relevance Marketing:

Hyper-local Maxima activation triggered scalable, online to offline sales

-Result-24% target over delivery in controlled geographies (maxima targeting), where we drove traffic to the stores, versus other geographies.

Cloning cross category/brand audience:

Used Maxima Data Lab’s Brand Intent cohort for a variant launch. Identified & triggered an audience that would be most likely buy Dove’s new variant

Dove delivered 20% higher volume sales through this campaign on the new variant