Venus Ozdemir is the Integrated Marketing Experience Director for Eurasia and the Middle East at The Coca-Cola Company.
How far would you go for an all-expenses-paid trip to the most anticipated sporting event of the year?Some people are willing to do almost anything.
That was exactly the idea behind our YouTube campaign Earlier this year, we provided 60 people with flights and tickets to the sold-out match between Saudi Arabia and Argentina. FIFA World Cup Qatar Tournament.
Our campaign had two important goals.
- Reach and drive sales to Saudi Arabia’s Gen Z (those born between 1997 and 2012) in a fun and cost-effective way.
- Our campaign tagline is “Belief is Magic” and inspires Saudi Gen Z to dream big and believe in their team winning against all odds.
Get the ball rolling with a Gen Z deep dive
Recognizing that the success of a campaign depends on how well you know your audience, we started with audience research in collaboration with Google and media agency EssenceMediacom.
Google teams use internal tools to identify top YouTubers and search trends — What Saudi Arabia Searched for — combines them with data insights from audience research tools that EssenceMediacom subscribed to.
Trending searches and insights from this study included terms such as “home buying,” “skydiving,” and “fashionista.” These directly inspired affinity audience — a broad audience group with strong specific interests — that you chose to reach during your campaign. For example, “Home and Garden Enthusiast”, “Gamer”, “Football Fan”, “Fashionista”, “Gourmet”, etc.
Defining these audience affinities helped shape the video creative, which focused on the premise that most people would do just about anything to get tickets to the already sold-out World Cup.
Change the game with character capture creative
If you want to get it generation z Please note, our ads are not just different. It also needed to be relatable. So we collaborated with a well-known Saudi Gen Z comedy creator. Mohamed Shamsicreate just one base video starring Shamsi and create all other videos from there.
Next came creative management platforms. We used a combination of creative agency tools. advertising creative studioGoogle’s AI-powered creative management platform. By connecting an affinity audience to the latter and utilizing that affinity audience. The power of AIwe were able to create 32 personalized video ads from that one base video in just a few days.
Ads Creative Studio achieved this by automatically exchanging specific visuals and messages in real-time, tailored to the interests of the selected audience. If the designer had done this, it would have taken weeks.
For example, in an ad used to reach “home and garden enthusiasts,” Shamsi asks viewers how they think they can improve their chances of competing in the FIFA World Cup.
He proposes inventing a new technique for mowing soccer fields, showing a humorous visual of a man lying face down mowing grass. He quickly added that buying a Coca-Cola might be an easier way to get tickets or tickets to the tournament.
Check out the ad below.
Another ad, with the same overall message but swapping the visuals and messaging to suit the interests of “thrill seekers”, shows someone skydiving into a stadium.
Ads Creative Studio is a cloud-based platform. This allows creative teams to easily share assets directly with GroupM Nexus, the media performance specialists who set up, optimized and reported on the campaign. The ability to upload and manage campaigns from the same platform where ads are designed greatly increases collaboration, transparency, and efficiency.
Lineup for a powerful attack
Once our personalized video assets were ready, we needed to make sure they were shown to the right people. Powered by AI YouTube video reach campaign and Skippable in-stream ads To do so.
The YouTube Video Reach campaign used Google’s AI to help drive awareness by delivering the best mix of ads to improve reach and efficiency on YouTube.
Skippable in-stream ads, on the other hand, are optimized for video views and are counted when a user watches an ad for 30 seconds. Our ads were approximately 38 seconds each, so this bidding option was a great way to drive consideration and understand our audience’s interests.
GroupM Nexus implemented the entire campaign through Google’s end-to-end campaign management solution. Display & Video 360. This makes it easy to control every aspect, from collaboration to access to audience insights, bidding and optimization, spend management, and where your ads appear.
Trophy-worthy result
Not only did we achieve a video view-through rate of 46% versus the planned 30%, but this was 36% higher than the industry benchmark. They also saved 42% of their planned cost-per-view bid budget.
During the promotional period, Coca-Cola’s market share in Saudi Arabia increased by 10% and sales volume increased by 22%. These are the highest numbers confirmed for a promotional campaign in Saudi.
We used this strategy for our World Cup campaign, and the lessons are universal. We know that personalized marketing performs significantly better than standard creative and is the easiest way to create personalized ads at scale. We plan to continue using this strategy to incorporate dynamic, personalized ads into our core campaigns.
