Malaysian Media Awards Winners Showcase

Challenge
AXE, a deodorant that promises to “give guys an edge in the mating game”, needs a digital search strategy to target young men who spend most of their time online. Since guys don’t typically search for “fragrance” or “deos”, how do we use Search to create AXE’s brand territory online?

Solution
Malaysian men are introverts when it comes to dating, rarely discussing women and relationships. Instead, they spend lots of time on dating/relationship and video sites to meet women, because they feel less intimidated to interact with them online. Keyword categories related to dating are also amongst the highest in Malaysia, generating almost 8 million monthly searches. Fusing together these insights, we formulated a strategy to capture young men when they “pursue” women online.

Execution
Firstly, we expanded the brand territory to tap into male interest areas mainly around the topic of ‘women’; for e.g. ‘dating tips’ and ‘pick-up lines’. Then, we implemented a complete Search strategy which included contextual targeting, display & mobile search. This enabled us to capture our target audience during the highest moments of relevance, whether they were searching or reading relevant content; be it on their PCs or mobile devices. We hijacked their “man space”!

Results
•50 million ad impressions generated; indicative of successful brand territory mapping.
•CTR% 15 times higher than industry norms; reflecting high relevance of keyword categories & effective contextual targeting.
•Mobile search alone recorded a CTR% of almost 15% and an all-time low CPC of just RM0.09!