Malaysian Media Awards Winners Showcase

Objective & Challenge
Panadol is the most trusted pain relief brand in Malaysia occupying more than 90% market share in the category – but, it has been a very tough brand to grow on traditional e-commerce platforms like Shopee and Lazada due to various reasons: 1. Since it is an OTC brand, we’re not able to drive price promotions or trade promotions like GWP (Gift with Purchase) to entice users to purchase the brand – an approach that has been mighty effective on some of GSK’s other brands. 2. The brand has a very need-based purpose – example, if a consumer has a headache, they want it instantly and cannot afford to wait 3-5 days for the delivery through an e-commerce partner. While we were rolling out biggest ever campaign for post vaccination care across multiple touchpoints, we were also tasked to put a heavy emphasis on driving growth on the e-commerce front overcoming the challenges that exist.

Insight & Strategy
Insight: As part of the first round of mass vaccination arranged by the government, they had allotted almost 35 vaccination centres across the major cities. Netizens were to sign-up on the government created website for vaccination registrations. The response on that platform was so over-whelming that the platform crashed on the day of registration and within the first 2 hours, all the allocated slots had been booked. With great luck, one of our team members were able to register as part of the first batch of mass vaccinations organized by the Malaysian government. Through that personal experience, we mapped out consumers’ entire vaccination journey which helped us to identify key insights which formed an anchor for our e-commerce approach: 1. A vast majority of people came to the vaccination centres using Grab or other e-hailing platforms because of ambiguity over parking and the post vaccination side-effects. 2. At the last stage of vaccination, there was a 15min observation window during which HCPs pre-empted netizens of the post vaccination side-effects and advised to take paracetamol to relieve pain. Furthermore, the Ministry of Health of Malaysia announced that people will likely experience post vaccination symptoms for 3 – 5 days and advised people to drink lots of water and take paracetamol as needed. Strategy: The insights presented a very clear “need-based” opportunity – which happens to be the vaccination day + 5 days to induce purchase given the symptoms post vaccination have a short shelf-life for most. Given the tie-up to post vaccination care and the short pain window of opportunity, it was not feasible for us to use the orthodox way of using CPAS or Google Smart Shopping Ads to drive traffic to the Lazada and Shopee of the world because: 1. Both, Google and Facebook, are unable to locate precisely individuals who’ve been vaccinated within our target window due to limited location proximity targeting. 2. Even if these platforms could target those newly vaccinated individuals, driving traffic to Lazada and Shopee would be pointless because by the time those individuals order online and received their delivery, they would have likely fallen out of the “need-based” window. As a result, our e-commerce strategy had to center around a platform which can identify individuals within the “need-based” window and provide them with the solution to their problem instantly. The only platform capable of doing that was Grab and so, our strategy revolved around Grab.

Execution
Geo-location is basically Grab’s bread and butter and given the insight that majority of the audiences took Grab to get to vaccination centers, we used that location data to re-target them post their vaccination at very high frequencies in their next five days. This was primarily to mirror Ministry of Health’s announcement that post vaccination symptoms would ordinarily linger for that period. The core messaging for this execution was “Panadol can help relieve symptoms of pain and fever post COVID-19 vaccination.” The communication was aired across Grab on their “Home Feed,” “In-Transit Food” and “In-Transit Transport” as static visuals. For those taking Grab straight from the vaccination, their In-Transit Transport message headline was even more contextual asking “Feeling pain or feverish Post Vaccination?” to drive higher relevance. The consumer journey was mapped out in a way whereby, there was a clear call-to-action for consumers to purchase Panadol through Grab Mart. Essentially, ensuring that we’re able to close the consumer journey loop within a span of 1-hour. This way, we could ensure that we can reach and deliver the product within our designated “need-based” window. From second month onwards, we even used re-targeting pool of “purchasers” to expand our pool of audiences beyond only the vaccinated.

Effectiveness
The campaign turned out to be a resounding success from a media deliverable standpoint as well as from a business results standpoint. The campaign managed to reach over 800,000 vaccinated individuals or their proxy caretakers during the campaign through precise proximity layering. The campaign managed to deliver CTRs of just a shade over 1% (much higher than any benchmarks for static display ads). The In-Transit Feed turned out to be the best performing ad-placement with a CTR of 1.79%. Grab Mart’s contribution in terms of sales was around RM40,000 organically on average per month. Here’s how the sales fared during the activation: May: Organic average RM40,000 + RM72,318 incremental = RM112,318 (ROAS of 2.89) June: Organic average RM40,000 + RM94,000 incremental = RM134,982 (ROAS of 3.76) July: Organic average RM40,000 + RM186,777 incremental = RM226,777 (ROAS of 7.47) Grab Mart, which was a tiny contributor in e-commerce sales for GSK turned into a sales behemoth during the entirety of this campaign. Upon the great success of this activation, this unorthodox e-commerce model became a best practice within GSK for Panadol and was rolled out to other SEA markets during their respective vaccination rollouts. But, aside from sales numbers, the most satisfactory part of this campaign was that we were able to provide pain relief to Malaysians at a very painful time.