2018 Award Winners: Programmatic, Video and In-app Advertising campaigns

Following last week’s Effective Mobile Marketing Awards Ceremony, we continue our round-up of the winning campaign in each category with a look at the winners in the Most Effective Programmatic Buying Campaign, Most Effective Use of Video, and Most Effective In-app advertising categories.

Most Effective Programmatic Buying Campaign: New Look and Criteo – Customer Acquisition Beta
With this campaign, New Look wanted to engage a wider online audience in order to bring new customers to its website, and then drive conversions from them, focusing on those who were most likely to buy.

To do so, it turned to Criteo’s Customer Acquisition Beta technology. This allowed New Look to analyse the anonymised browsing and purchase history of over 1.2bn monthly shoppers in Criteos user database. It also enabled the retailer to implement a full funnel approach to its acquisition efforts. Potential customers who had a high propensity to buy could be immediately profiled and targeted with relevant products, based on Criteos sponsored product network.

In order to use this wealth of data efficiently, Criteo’s Customer Acquisition Beta made use of machine-learning to identify key trends behaviours that would enable New Look to effectively target net-new customers. It assessed anonymised browsing and purchasing events of individual shoppers across a wide-range of sites, gradually refining its recommendations as it learned the trends and best responses to them.

The visibility offered by the platform meant that the vertical and category aggregated data could then be used to evaluate product preferences, providing New Look with crucial targeting insight for those new customers. Additionally, each prospect was assigned a unique score on their profile based on their propensity to buy.

The campaign was a resounding success, delivering 4x more orders than New Look saw with any of its other acquisition partners, and a 74 per cent reduction in cost per order compared to other acquisition partners. Impressive figures and a worthy winner.

Judges’ View: “An impressive campaign in which Criteo’s Customer Acquisition Beta technology achieved a number of outstanding results.”

Most Effective Use of Video: McLaren Automotive, Blis and DCT8 – McLaren Automotive Europe Campaign
With the release of the Sport Series 570S spider, McLaren Automotive was looking to challenge sports car audience perceptions of the brand and bring new prospect consumers in for test drives. To do this, the team behind the campaign identified high earners aged 30-65 with an interest in luxury goods and prestige cars as its key audience, and built a strategy to target them.

The team used geofencing around affluent locations like exclusive clubs and hotels, Michelin star restaurants and luxury retailers to identify its key audience, then identified competitor dealerships close to McLaren Automotive retailers. When profiled consumers were close to rival dealerships, the campaign targeted them in real-time with video ads, offering them a chance to learn more about McLaren’s latest models online or at a local retailer.

The campaign delivered over 4.2m impressions and drove over 23,000 consumers to the McLaren landing page to learn more about their latest models. In addition, McLaren was able to identify new conquest customers, with footfall data generated by the campaign providing key insights for future marketing.

Judges’ View: “A well thought-out campaign with good-looking creative and impressive results.”

Most Effective In-app Advertising Campaign: Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Digitas – Yeasayers Game
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) wanted to engage IT decision makers and show them why it could help to stop saying ‘no’ to IT requests and start saying ‘yes’ more often.

HPE analysed the Twitter profiles of 500 IT decision makers and found an overwhelming interest in video games – particularly retro games – finding that only sport and family got more attention.

Using the interest in retro gaming, HPE and Digitas looked toward the iconic video game Pong, where players hit a ball back and forth using paddles. In Pong, players usually shake their head from side-to-side, mimicking the act of saying ‘no’.

The concept of Pong was then taken to create an original game, a game which rotated Pong’s classic style and made it into a vertical play area – helping players go from saying ‘no’ to saying ‘yes’.

Power-ups in the game, called the ‘Yeasayers Game’, were added to showcase the benefits of HPE products and services. Hybrid IT was displayed in the form of a temporary banner, preventing the player from losing the ball; Intelligent Edge was presented by giving the player another paddle; and HPE Data & Analytics was showed off via an onscreen ‘data line’, revealing the exact path of the ball.

The game, developed with the Economist Group, was incorporated within The Economist’s apps. Average dwell time was found to be one minute 15 seconds in The Economist Digital Edition app and one minute 37 seconds in The Economist Espresso app. These dwell times include every reader of The Economist’s apps and not just those who chose to play the game.

The game had a click-through rate to HPE.com which was 6.7 times the standard awareness campaign and mobile interaction rate was four times the standard. Meanwhile, engagement with the game increase propensity to click through to HPE.com by five times on mobile and players went beyond standard engagement levels, performing three times more defined valuable actions on the HPE site compared to those attracted via standard display ads.

Judges’ View: “This B2B campaign demonstrated a clear understanding of the target market and delivered a great game for senior IT decision makers. A fantastic partnership and execution with the Economist.”

You can see details of all the winning entries here