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Macro context: In today’s digital ecosystem consumers are more privacy conscious than ever before, making it more important for brands to reach, target and connect with audiences in a privacy compliant way that is respectful to the end user. Add to this the recent rise in widely distributed browsers blocking third party cookies by default and the ability for brands to target users through traditional retrospective targeting is being significantly restricted and therefore impacting reach and...

No industry can avoid adapting to the changes brought by the digital revolution, and the pet care category is no different, with 65% of growth being driven by online sales. In 2015, after many years prioritising mass reach from TV, Whiskas launched its first digital content foray: Kitten Kollege, seeking new ways of resonating with audiences. Whiskas’ first digital venture had been designed as an entertaining content series to respond to search queries around cat care. But Mars also needed to...

Twentieth Century Fox worked with agencies Mindshare and Think Jam to create a YouTube campaign for the release of Deadpool 2. With the aim of utilising the personality of the Deadpool character, a multi-step sequence was devised in order to drive digital downloads, with Deadpool himself personally providing the skip and view messaging. Each bespoke, skippable pre-roll identified where the viewer was on their journey. They were initially served an action-packed trailer. If they watched the full...

When Tiffany & Co. noticed a decline in search interest, it decided to act quickly. The jewellery brand tasked Wavemaker Global with strategically investing in underdeveloped categories to diversify campaign and channel revenue mix. It wanted to develop a framework that could be rolled out to global markets, so the team set out to test new initiatives that would deliver significant change to Tiffany’s customer acquisition online. It used Google’s Smart Shopping Campaigns to categorise products...

Digitas UK was tasked with maximising reach for a sports apparel brand across 
 the United Kingdom and Germany using both Connected TV (CTV) and online video. The brand wanted to achieve a video completion rate (VCR) of at least 70% across both of these channels. By using private marketplace (PMP) deals across multiple publishers (such as SpotX and Smartclip) Digitas UK activated CTV buys across both the UK and Germany.

Like many publishers in today’s climate, the lifestyle publishing company Apartment Therapy, is constantly looking for innovative ways to appeal to today’s buyers and boost ad spend. As the industry stands today, more than 70% of all marketing dollars are swallowed by the Walled Gardens, leaving publishers in a continuous search for additional revenue streams and tools to incentivise ad spend. IX helped Apartment Therapy capture incremental agency spend via a new publisher-controlled...

Immediate Media Co, a publishing house headquartered in London, was looking for a technical solution to help increase revenue without sacrificing the user experience — an ask Index Exchange took to the next level. With the help of its technical support teams and first-of-their-kind product developments, Index was able to integrate a number of solutions that have allowed Immediate to thrive, including Adaptive Timeout (which uses machine learning to help increase the number of bids -- and...

Quaker Oats is a brand with centuries of history and heritage, and a longstanding category leader in markets around the world. Yet for many years its brand platform and communications have been disparate, with own-brand labels squeezing its share. Meanwhile global nutrition trends were helping drive awareness of breakfast as the most important meal of the day. But while the number of breakfast occasions were increasing, the cereal category was in decline. What’s more, people didn’t understand...

No1 Lounges offers award-winning airport lounges for travellers, with bars, food and a range of pre-flight services including spas and beds. It wanted to enhance marketing effectiveness through better understanding of channel performance, having recognised that customer journeys today are rarely a linear progression from one point in the sales funnel to another. Its main objective was to reduce pay per click (PPC) spend and identify areas for more effective budget redistribution and growth. It...

Cutting through the holiday noise is a tall order for any brand, especially in a flourishing market like luxury fashion. With so many options to choose from, people are becoming less brand-loyal in favour of brands and creative that speaks to their personal needs. Mr Porter knew one-size-fits-all creative wasn’t going to cut it. So, rather than simply uploading one core ad to YouTube, it partnered with Google’s Unskippable Labs to test the impact of video ad sequences and reach new shoppers. The...

When financial services company Liberis came to independent attribution provider Fospha Marketing, it had the goal of increasing visibility of its consumers’ digital journeys. It wanted to unlock the hidden value in its data to reduce cost, increase efficiency and drive growth. Liberis helps small businesses find the finance they need and it wanted to ensure it was getting its message to the right people, at the right time. Fospha helped the financial services brand to leverage a bespoke...

Simply Business caters for a vast array of different small business types - from butchers to bakers to personal trainers. As such, the brand needs sophisticated audience pools. And, with opera singers and meerkats making it hard to stand out, the insurance market is a crowded space. The objective of this campaign was to communicate that no matter the size, sector or nature of your business, Simply Business can provide insurance. It used the strapline ‘You Name It, We Insure It’. Simply Business...

It’s no secret that rapidly scaling any business brings challenges. For Hostelworld, which offers backpackers access to tens of thousands of lodgings around the globe, expansion has happened faster than for most. CEO Gary Morrison believes that, while the brand uses a wide range of channels to communicate with consumers, search is among the most important. With an ever-increasing range of destinations and properties, keeping cost per acquisition down has been a priority for the brand. To this...

The 2018 Heathrow Christmas campaign, the third iteration of the Heathrow Bears, had two core objectives: to generate reach, awareness and engagement while also increasing the acquisition of products and services to Christmas travellers. The challenge was to leverage the familiarity of what audiences had seen before, while reaching new audiences. YouTube formed the backbone of the campaign, from launching via a Masthead, down to Bumpers keeping the brand front of mind. Agency iCrossing helped...

Agency Zenith was tasked to run a video campaign for a well-known hay fever remedy, targeting a fixed demographic of females between the ages of 35 and 54 in the UK. It had a video completion rate (VCR) goal of 70%. Demand-side platform The Trade Desk was brought in to help with automated demographic targeting and streamlining workflow. It uses third-party data from its data management platform to identify high on-target percentages for a given demographic. The pharma brand used its VCR and auto...

Brands need true expertise as well as technology to manage video, display, social and mobile advertising campaigns today. Insights and reporting are critical to monitoring and maintaining success. For this campaign, video completion rate (VCR) was a key metric. This is a measurement of the rate at which your digital video impressions play to 100%, so it’s important for understanding the efficiency and effectiveness of campaigns. The goals for the fast food restaurant brand were very specific: it...

Eurostar is the high-speed railway service connecting London with various European cities via the Channel Tunnel. Its website houses a large quantity of landing pages featuring content on the service’s range of destinations. The Eurostar team wanted to leverage this content to expand the reach of its search marketing. But like many businesses, Eurostar.com had a dizzying array of landing pages to choose from. In order for Eurostar to serve the user with the right content at the right moment, it...

English Heritage cares for hundreds of historic places, from prehistoric sites to grand country houses. It was looking for new ways to promote its brand and was aware that video could help. So, the charity set out to combine its historical know-how with YouTube’s powerful platform. It grew subscribers from 1,000 to 390,000 in just over three years, transforming its channel from a hodge-podge of ad hoc content into an internationally-popular brand asset – one that has the potential to become a...

Direct Line Group wanted to consolidate fragmented data across the business and improve understanding around its customers’ digital journeys. With the aim of creating a unified view of customers’ behaviours online and linking them with economic factors (for instance, to quantify how much ‘drop-outs’ are costing them), Direct Line Group also wanted to have more efficient access to data to implement key insights more easily, thereby optimising marketing effectiveness. In order to create a...

A leading car manufacturer tasked media agency PHD UK with decreasing the cost per acquisition (CPA) measured on the number of car service bookings. PHD used an early version of demand-side platform The Trade Desk’s Planner tool to uncover deep data-driven insights on location and device which were applied to the campaign before it went live. Planner is designed to allow brands and agencies to generate, launch and analyse programmatic media plans in one place. It uses data-driven insights from...