The Body Shop is an iconic brand, with exceptionally loyal customers devoted to its ethically-sourced beauty products.

However, the brand’s core audience was middle-aged women, and The Body Shop struggled to connect with a younger, time-poor mobile demographic.

Last Christmas, in partnership with International Alert’s Peace Play Project, The Body Shop set up the “Play for Peace” campaign. A cause that made a positive difference in the lives of child refugees in Syria, this campaign was targeted at socially-conscious millennial consumers.

The “Play for Peace” Christmas collection was packaged in eye-catching festive gift boxes that doubled as fun games. For every item bought from the seasonal collection, The Body Shop donated 4.4% to the cause.

Our task was to drive engagement from these young audiences.

Objectives:

1. To drive in-store footfall resulting in sales uplift of 5%

2. To create intuitive mobile ads with higher-than-average engagement rates of 15%

Six versions of The Body Shop ad units ran on smartphones from 3 November 2017 to 25 December 2017, in the following sequence:

3 November:

For Him, For Her

Advent Calendar

15 November:

Duck n’ Dive

20 November:

Truth or Dare

7 December:

Christmas Goodies

11 December:

12 Days Christmas Treats

All creatives were full-screen mobile banners that were built with our proprietary technology and layered on top of HTML5. High-resolution and lightweight, these formats are fully responsive to touch and movement, and load faster than standard rich media formats.

This resulted in high impact ad formats that helped The Body Shop provide the best user experience, and deliver intuitive and crisp content to younger, time-poor mobile audiences.

The playable ads were delivered programmatically to young, mobile audiences via a combination of:

>Traditional parameters: e.g. location and demographics

>Smart targeting of behaviour and interest trends: e.g. an interest in beauty and skincare products for self-pampering and gifting purposes, and a combined preference for shopping online and in brick-and-mortar stores

The ad unit placements were on mobile web and in-app inventory across relevant site verticals such as lifestyle and beauty, along with more generic ones, including news and travel.