Objective: The telecomms company needed to boost hardware sales as well as establish the new "Green" key message

Situation: TV advertising is still deemed as absolutely crucial due to its still existing core advantages: strong audiovisual content combined with an extremely quick buildup of reach at scale. But especially in the highly competitive telecommunication segment, everyone is fighting for the same audiences and placements - with the same data, KPIs and tools.

How could the telecommunications brand "break out" of this system, in which significant performance boosts are almost impossible or too expensive?

The brand partnered up with a TV data startup to bring TV advertising into the digital era. This tech company hereby utilized the brand's first-party data which includes TV zapping behavior and preferences of more than one million TV households - and turned the resulting metrics into actionable planning insights and optimization guidelines. For the first time, the brand's campaigns were measured and optimized based on actual TV audience behavior of millions of devices, and specifically for the first time in Germany, this enabled the usage of second-by-second KPIs rather than the usually standard ad break averages.

The purpose for this optimization was clear: find significant opportunities for incremental reach within the target audience, thus maximizing overall net reach of the campaign - while avoiding high frequencies

Starting with July 2021, the tech company and the media agency analyzed all of the brand's campaigns, identifying patterns and optimization potentials

across:

-Audience zapping behavior around and within ad breaks

-View-Through-Rates

-Efficiency of special / corner placements

-Incrementality analyses across dayparts and channels, especially longtail channels

-Lookalike, usage-based audience profiles

These analyses resulted in condensed "TV Golden Planning Rules" as well as ongoing iterations which were then adapted for the first time for the TV campaign in October 2021.

Examples of resulting changes & actions:

-Introduction of smaller TV channels into the mix

-Identification of "content pairs" with the highest audience overlap

-Placement of longer ads at the end of ad breaks with significant and predictable rising reach

-Identification of lookalikes of content fans outside of the already highly competitive content / programming

Scale / Budget:

€12,5 m in TV

While keeping the budget at the same level as comparable campaigns, the brand was able to achieve 4% more in net reach with this new first-party-driven TV approach. Within the conventional planning setup, this incremental net reach would have additionally cost approximately €5m (gross) to achieve.

Specific outcomes:

-16% sales uplift on mobile products

-22% uplift of likeability to buy mobile products

-Media impact on sales increased from 13,8% to 18,2%