This campaign’s performance was excellent from the beginning of the campaign. The initial result of the micro survey told us that brand favorability score (Proportion of those who answer “Very Favorable” about AQL) from those who saw the ad increased 39% times higher than from those who did not. (Control: n=145 / Exposed: n=509) However what surprised us is that the rate increased to 71% after adding new creative and targeting (Control: n=72 / Exposed: n=200). This is almost double the impact from the beginning of the campaign.

Our creative use of data doubled the impact of the campaign

Most innovations in ad serving technology are focused on targeting but our approach demonstrates that such technology can, and should, also be used to ensure the relevance and impact of creative. Using technology to give us a human view of online behavior by segments and matching the creative to those emotional contexts gave us a new way of optimizing campaigns and has transformed the brand perception of AQL.

We monitored the performance of our campaign by the micro survey on online dashboard, optimized creative selection.

A finding in this monitoring made this project unique further. It said that while brand awareness of the category leader and AQL were overlapped well, but ever purchase of those were less. The competitor brand enjoyed broader unique purchasers. The question was, why didn’t they go further and buy AQL? We needed to know more about the competitor’s users, to change this situation.

We had an idea. We merged attitude data from the survey and behavior data from DSP, to discover the difference between these brand users.

There was a big difference. The typical AQL user visits fewer skincare sites, and is more likely to look at sites concerned with childbirth, children’s education, cooking, and anime. The competitor’s typical user regularly goes online to look at skincare, magazines, fashion, shoes and interiors.

From this behavior data, we can imagine the persona of both brand users.

Skincare comes further down the list of priorities for an AQL user – they spend more time on their hobby or domestic work. For them, a key benefit of using AQL that it is all-in-one and saves them precious time. The message is: ‘Less time on skin care makes a day longer.’ And this was served to people who have similar behavior to AQL users.

On the other hand, the competitor’s typical user knows a lot about skincare (they spend a lot of time online finding out about it), fashion and lifestyle. For these users, the message is ‘Rich in Collagen GL nutrition!’ because they already know what they are looking for. And we added another version with a mimetic word conveying efficacy to skin. These two were served to users who have similar behavior to competitor users.