Malaysian Media Awards Winners Showcase





2019 | |

unifi’s Trojan horse in the broadband wars

Advertiser: unifi
Brand: unifi
Creative Agency: -
Credits: -

The Challenges
With the Government’s ambition to drive broadband penetration, unifi was tasked to deliver double the speed, at half the price. With the competition offering the same speed, for the same price, we had the most to lose. Worse, the unifi brand was falling out of favour with the public and outspent by its closest competitor, Maxis (by more than 6X!). How do we sustain our share of the market?

Insight, Strategy and the Idea
Besides reasserting unifi’s broadband leadership driven by brand video placements across YouTube and Facebook, we also had to drive subscriptions. However, as an utility, people almost never think about broadband. Thus, we identified 3 moments during which they are most receptive:
1. Hijack relevant life event: Setting an installation appointment is something people dread. So, we leaned into that behaviour – targeting people who WERE already arranging appointments for deliveries and installations in their homes i.e. New Home Owners
2. Hijack competitive intent: Competitive broadband brands search volumes had increased by 59% post the Minister’s announcement. So when people search for Maxis or/and TIME instead of seeing intended ads from Maxis or/and TIME, people saw our ads first.
3. Hijack competitive user attention: UniversityofLoyola research shows that color increases brand recognition by up to 80%. We do think of telco brands in colors – Digi yellow, Maxis green or Celcom blue. We leveraged on the heightened attention of users to their subscribed Internet Service Provider (ISP). Via ISP targeting, we baited users with what looks like a proposition from their current ISP, only to receive a better offer from unifi.

Media Execution
We developed a firsttomarket custom segment of “New Home Owners”, building an audience pool who have consumed content that bears resemblance to new home owners – topics like home decoration & design; bedroom, kitchen and bathroom; consumer electronics; home insurance policy; and home security – and creating a lookalike audience from there on, allowing us to reach this audience at scale. With search, we trained the AdWords tool to attack competitor keywords and cleverly injected our messaging seamlessly as part of the ad copy. Enhancing our programmatic targeting, layered with ISP, allowed us to create dynamic color ads:
• Maxis users saw a Maxis Greencolored unifi banner
• TIME users saw a TIME Pinkcolored unifi banner
• Whereas unifi and Streamyx saw unifi’s own orangecolored banner

Results and Effectiveness
Campaign delivered 31% more than planned traffic; search contributing 74% of visits to unifi website
• 41% of Maxis searchers who reacted to “maxisfied” ads, visited unifi website
• 53% of TIME searchers who reacted to “TIMEfied” ads, visited unifi website Custom banners meant:
• Competitively targeted: Engagement rate up by 2X vs brand campaigns in unifi color
• Moment targeted: “New home owner” banners outperformed standard banners in 3 key areas: Relevance: 170% lift in clickthrough rates (CTRs) + Efficiency: 42% improvement in conversion from impression to landstosite + Quality: 50% improvement in conversion from impression to leads generated Sales: Online broadband subscriptions grew by 3X, contributing towards unifi’s 50% growth of average monthly new customer signups vs. the year before. Source: Client data, MCMC