An Auto Brand Used User-Generated Content And Advanced Optimization To Win Gold With Twitter Audiences

C A S E S T U D Y

C H A L L E N G E

Enticing more than 36.1 million viewers across all devices for the opening

ceremony alone, the Olympic Games offer brands a lucrative opportunity for some

serious exposure. In fact, for the past five years, each iteration of the games has

undergone a steady increase in advertising dollars spent. The 2016 Olympics

was no exception to this trend, securing a record amount of advertising dollars

totaling $1.2 billion. The flipside to this upside is that brands still have to deal

with the tricky task of standing apart from a mass of competitors.

This was the exact challenge that a Leading Automotive Brand

faced for a rather complex Twitter campaign. Interested in driving

excitement and awareness for their upcoming 10-year sponsorship

of the Olympics, marketers leveraged the Unified Platform’s Pacing

Dashboard and Optimizer to lower costs and achieve a high video

view rate for their campaign.

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S T R A T E G Y

The Brand aimed to charm consumers with a campaign that would drive engagement

and, ultimately, interest in its new partnership with the Olympics. The Brand’s

partnership allowed them to launch exclusive, groundbreaking ad campaigns on a

new, Olympics-focused digital platform, while also supporting the Olympics Games

and affiliated groups. To draw users’ attention to the campaign, marketers created the

following three-pronged strategy:

MIXING IT UP:

TIGHTENED TARGETING:

Marketers used Unified’s Pacing Dashboard to easily

track the performance of three types of Twitter ad

units in real-time—First View, Promoted Trend, and

Conversational Card Ads. Each ad provided special

benefits to the campaign: First View Ads secured the

top ad spot in users’ newsfeeds, Promoted Trends

appeared at the top of Trending Topics on Twitter,

and Conversational Card Ads included a call-to-action

(CTA) that prominently displayed a custom hashtag.

Marketers deployed a two-part strategy that

leveraged the Unified Platform’s Optimizer to

automatically reallocate budgets to the best-

performing targeting groups. For the first part

of the campaign, marketers targeted people

interested in the Olympics as well as fans of

The Brand itself. For the second deployment,

marketers targeted users who engaged with the

initial campaign creative for an even higher level

of engagement with premium audiences.

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UNIQUELY UGC:

For the first campaign deployment, marketers designed creative

that featured friendly images of people holding hands, with a

custom hashtag and emoji. This post asked Olympics enthusiasts

to reply with similar pictures repeating” the same custom hashtag,

and stated that each picture submitted would earn a donation

to benefit an Olympics-related charity. The second part of the

campaign, released afterwards, featured the most original and

captivating images from that promotion. This approach was

particularly effective, since half of US social media users feel user-

generated content is more trustworthy than from any other source.

Additionally, because these “ads” didn’t look like ads, users were

more likely to engage and share the content.

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38.4%Lower CPM

Than Benchmark

R E S U L T S

Though marketers were competing with hundreds of other social ads, The Brand was able to

exceed its benchmarks to deliver the following results:

41.2%More Video

Views to 100%Than Benchmark

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When competition is quite stiff as it is during the Olympics, an effective method

marketers can use to break through the noise is narrowing targeting down to the

most valuable audiences with multiple campaigns. This two-pronged approach,

coupled with the ability to track activity in real-time and increase optimization with

the Unified Platform, were the key factors for success in this case.

Additionally, implementing a user-generated ad campaign was particularly effective

in this awareness campaign because of two main reasons. First, they ads weren’t

traditional, so users were much more likely to interact with them, and second, the

posts potentially came from someone the users knew, which made them much more

likely to absorb and share the message.

C O N C L U S I O N

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Unified delivers technology and services to connect marketing data sets and optimize investments across the customer journey. Unified’s software empowers Fortune 500 companies and agencies to drive marketing success in the context of their business goals. The Unified platform transforms fragmented marketing data into actionable intelligence and real-time activation. Unified has offices in New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Chicago. For more information visit www.Unified.com.

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A B O U T

------------------------------------------August 2016 New York Times article titled “As Olympic Viewership Falls, NBC Thinks of the Bigger Picture”

2016 International Olympic Committee document titled “Olympic Marketing Fact File”

August 2016 AdAge article titled “NBC Hits Record $1.2 Billion In Ad Sales for Olympics”

December 2016 Alapic and WithPR report titled “Consumer Trust: Keeping It Real”

Sources

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