Archives




2021 | |

AIA Knows When You Are Asleep, AIA Knows When You Are Awake

Advertiser: AIA Malaysia
Brand: AIA Malaysia
Creative Agency: Leo Burnett
Credits: -

90_FINALIST_OC3_SLEEPTRACKER

Objective & Challenge
As part of their new brand promise of Healthier, Longer Better Lives, AIA Malaysia shifted its focus to the importance of wellbeing of Malaysians. With media being primarily a push platform, how can we utilize media to improve the well being of Malaysians? Impressions, Clicks, CTR, CPC, Views or View Rate has always been the norm of measurement when it comes to digital advertising. However with significant advancement in digital ad tracking technology, could we go further take a step away from standard digital measurement metrics and use digital media for tangible good? Aside from understanding the key digital media deliverables, we also sought to ad tech tools to measure the digital consumption patterns of the Malaysians online population and hence push them the right messaging to encourage these users to live a Healthier, Longer, Better Lives.

Insight & Strategy
Malaysians are getting more and more Mobile centric with audiences spending at least 6 hours online, up 23% year on year. It is not surprising that mobile has been the last screen they looking at before going to sleep. This heavy reliance on mobile screen time has been well documented in disrupting the sleeping patterns of many around the world . Locally, according to the study by the Malaysian Healthiest Workplace Survey in 2019, 9 out of 10 Malaysians working adult suffering from at least 1 form of sleep disorder or another. With mobile being the device that we are most connected to, we realise that we can reverse engineer our runofthemill 3rd party ad serving technology to monitor Malaysian’s digital activity. By tracking a user’s mobile device ID and digital usage pattern, we can accurately identify users who are consistently sleep deprived by measuring the time between their last and first mobile usage touchpoints, and the amount of ad impressions they have been served throughout the night. Our strategy was to combine the power of ad tracking and programmatic technology to remind audiences to get enough sleep for their next day activity.

Execution
Every time an ad is served from an ad server, it receives a unique bid request from the mobile device. We reversed engineered this to correlate the volume of bid request sent by unique mobile device IDs and mapped that against their activity level. Audiences were analyzed carefully based on their activeness by looking into the bid request from their mobile devices between 11pm 4am (which indicate that they are still active on their mobile during these hours). Using past 3 month’s data, we were able to categorized these users into 3 key segment by looking at the volume of vid request, namely Mild(users that had sent 1 5 times bid request to our DSP), Moderate(users that had sent 5 10 times bid request to our DSP), as well as Severe(users that had sent more than 10 times bid request to our DSP). We also analysed the time difference between their last ad impression and their next ad impression to identify people who have less than the recommended 7 hours of sleep. Programmatically, we were able to upload these device IDs as custom audience segment and hence able to actively reach them. At night, we pushed ads that reminded them to sleep early or that it is time to sleep. The next day, we remarket banners which pulls them to articles that discusses the importance of sleep. Both push and pull approach ensures maximum viewability of campaign.

Effectiveness
As a first of its kind approach, our Sleep Quality Tracker initiative tracked Malaysian’s quality of sleep over a period of 4 weeks, from there we managed to record significant improvements in quality of sleep within the Severe and Moderate groups: A total of 184,208 individuals (28%) from the Severe group had moved from Severe to Moderate. A total of 145,332 individuals (34%) of the Moderate group reported a reduction in digital activities online and a significant decrease in Last Activity Time from an average of 4am to 3am. The Mild audience group also reported to have the highest engagement (12% higher) in our Sleep Banners as compared to the other target groups. On our key campaign page, our traffic to site showed an uplift of 34%, with AIA health product related pages showing a significant traffic increase of over 200% (from 23,000 avg pages views to 73,049 page views) compared to previous AIA Vitality campaigns. Further attribution also showed a positive impact on bottom line by successfully generating up to 2,058 leads (with 500 leads as the initial target set by client) that had been passed to our agents for acquisition purposes. AIA Malaysia’s first of it’s kind experimentation with ad serving technology to track quality of sleep has yielded further interest beyond the Malaysia borders with other AIA market currently exploring the possibility of implementing this in their respective market.

2021 | |

Malaysia-Airlines going beyond Price War!

Advertiser: Malaysia Airlines Berhad
Brand: Malaysia Airlines Berhad
Creative Agency: M&C Saatchi; Magna Digital
Credits: -

80_GOLD_OC2_PRICEWAR

Objective & Challenge
The MATTA Fair is Malaysia’s largest travel fair and every year in March, Malaysians are spoilt for choices with the cheapest airfare promoted by airlines or travel agencies. 60% of Malaysian travelers will pick the best offers and plan their annual holidays. Consequently, the immediate period postMATTA Fair would typically experience a sharp deep in sales. The objectives set by MalaysiaAirlines were to prevent the sales dip and sustain the sales volume postMATTA fair. The challenge to the agency:

• To increase the sales for MalaysiaAirlines above MATTA fair sales in the subsequent month postMATTA Fair.

• To promote air tickets which were priced 2x higher compared to MATTA Fair.
Insight & Strategy
We needed to understand why MATTA fair did not attract the balance of the 40% travel intenders. What reasons should MalaysiaAirlines create to convert these travel intenders to purchase MalaysiaAirlines products? The agency created Intelligenic – a digital performance solutions that allowed us to understand traveler’s motivation based on their online & offline purchase behaviors. We analyzed 7 different datasets to enable Intelligenic solutions:

• Aircraft seat capacity (load factor) of the various routes • Realtime consumer journey data on the online booking site

• Lookalike modelling based on our frequent flyer database • Audience segments travel behaviour based on booking and actual flying lead time

• Fare prices from Google Flight Search

• Online and offline travel agent sales report • Pixel extension across the entire purchase journey, including all ancillary product pages Intelligenic analytics led us to 2 critical insights:

• Synergy between offline and online advertising spends (creative and media): By integrating offline sales reports, we can clearly evaluate the correlation between offline and online SPENDS vs. offline and online SALES RESULTS. The discovery proofed the need to adopt a holistic view and to optimize total advertising spends not just against ONLINE sales but also OFFLINE sales.

• PostMATTA Fair travel intenders: By analyzing these potential audience full buying journey, we discovered the need to go beyond cheapest airfare to attract our “pricefatigued” travelers. How? We analyzed our customer journey through MalaysiaAirlines ancillary pages (hotels, business class companion fair, business lounge access, children travel privileges, chef oncall, extra baggage allowance and pet cargo) which suggested that these travelers are motivated by convenience and value for every Ringgit spend i.e. appreciate ancillary products beyond just basic ticket price. Thus, we saw the opportunity for a campaign that was ancillaryled, giving birth to the MalaysiaAirlines Travelicious campaign. The campaign strategy focused on: • Optimize total advertising spends to maximize the reach to garner offline and online sales across all sales platform – online travel agent, IBE (Internet Booking Engine), call center, traditional travel agents. • Building a travel package primarily based on Traveler’s purchase motivation i.e ancillary products.
Execution
This ancillaryled Travelicious campaign was launched postMATTA from April to July 2019, across 15 markets globally with ancillary promotion 50% off on hotels, business class companion fares, extra baggage allowance, discount on children airfares, pet cargo and insurance PLUS only up to 35% discount on airfare compared to 60% discount during MATTA Fair. Insights gathered from Intelligenic solutions were used for the campaign execution as well:

• Across 15 local/regional/global markets the campaign required 1500 creatives in 10 languages. Dynamic creative optimization (DCO) allowed us to optimize delivery of the best performing messaging combination – language + different types of ancillary promotion + airfare discounts that meets the respective traveler’s needs. This involved housing a repository of campaign materials that allowed us to trigger custom messaging and redesign our creatives (based on flight and ancillary inventory, with realtime fare price comparison from Google Flight Search) all automized within a minute, whilst reducing human error.

• Switching between platforms for effectiveness during the 18 weeks campaigns: Reallocation of budgets between offline (newspaper, radio, digital out of home) and online platforms, audience segments, and creatives that delivered a higher sales return on advertising investment (ROAI), ensuring realtime optimization in a cost and time efficient manner.

• Create more customized lookalike segments based on their ancillary preferences, as exhibited by their behaviors on MalaysiaAirlines booking site, which was a new discovery with Intelligenic solutions vs. traditionally Google/YouTube custom audiences search behavior.

• Optimizing total spends ratio: Analyzing historical campaign data allowed us to identify sales impact and correlation between online and offline advertising spends (e.g. senior travelers who were served MalaysiaAirlines online promotion actually bought their air travel package from travel agents) Thus, from an 80:20 online offline spend ratio, we optimized towards a 60:40 ratio for an improved total Sales Return on advertising Investment. All made possible by Intelligenic!
Effectiveness
1) How media impacted the nonprice sensitive target audience? a. With ticket priced 2x higher compared to MATTA Fair, Travelicious campaign attracted 2.24 million visitors, total website visits grew by a factor of 2.17X compared to MATTA Fair. b. 71% of customers have opted for higher value tickets with ancillary promotions. 2) How media impacted MH sales performance and aircraft load factor? a. We almost tripled the sales growth by +155% compared to MATTA fair RM 55M. b. Load factor increased by +22%, and all 15 markets showed positive sales growth at an average of +29% compared to sales during MATTA fair. c. Ancillary services contributed to 35.5% of the total sales, which was +100% compared to prior and during MATTA Fair. 3 top selling ancillary products were MHHoliday Hotel Package Extra Baggage Allowance Children travel privileges 3) How media impacted the sales return on advertising investment? a. We achieved all time high sales return on advertising investment of 128x (every RM1 media spend in offline and online media delivered 128x in sales value) compared to MATTA Fair 119x. 4) How media impacted MalaysiaAirlines brand overall? b. Brand Buzz increased +44% (from 9.6 during MATTA to 13.9 during Travelicious) c. Consumer perception about the MH Brand Value increased positively by +31% (from 11 during MATTA to 14.6 during Travelicious) With Intelligenic solutions, MalaysiaAirlines can clearly own a full service value carrier position instead of cheap tickets competition.

2021 | |

Hong Leong Bank – Finding Gold Through The Magic Window

Advertiser: Hong Leong Bank
Brand: Hong Leong Bank
Creative Agency: Naga DDB Malaysia
Credits: -

84_BRONZE_EC3_FINDINGGOLD

Objective & Challenge
A priceless insight with loans, it’s not just “Who”, but “When”. About 80% of Personal Loan (PL) applications in Malaysia are fruitless for both customer and bank, with an average industry loan approval rate of only 20%. This stringency is driven by the banks’ need to maintain their overall credit health. We needed to help Hong Leong Bank (HLB) to improve these odds. But How? We knew that there was a demand for personal loans but conversions were not happening for HLB. We had to identify how we could do better and target quality applicants, in order to achieve the challenging KPIs set by the client: a) Increase in PL applications by 15% over the previous year (4,344) b) Increase in PL average approval rate to 23% (industry average is 20%, HLB previous year was 19%)

Insight & Strategy
Exploring the “Magic Window” We wanted to help HLB to sift and collect the nuggets of gold the good loan applicants more effectively. To identify we used our proprietary data suite to look into consumer behaviour data and discovered a powerful truth when it came to personal loans: “Timing is everything.” We discovered that HLB’s PL applications were at the highest in the first two weeks of the month. Knowing when was half the battle, we had to know who So we turned to our proprietary data suite to analyse HLB’s 1st party data. This tool not only gave us insights into the behaviour of 18M Malaysians across 23M digital IDs, but also helped us predict recurring and future behaviour. Moreover by incorporating HLB’s 1st party data we could track audience receptivity towards campaigns and content on HLB owned assets like websites, campaign landing pages and buy buttons – in real time. Allowing us to identify applicants that had Personal Loans approved. What we found were two key audiences and sized them to understand the potential for HLB: 1) Employed individuals, motivated by a need to settle bills / other debts before the month end due date. 2) Sole proprietors / small businesses, motivated by a need to settle payments to their business partners, vendors, etc. These were “The Responsible” groups who seek credit facilities but demonstrate healthy repayment behavior. They were the perfect seam from which to mine our gold. To scale our reach, we generated lookalike audiences (discarding the high risk prospects who typically searched for “fast cash”, “no conditions”, etc.) Then we set to work on really reaching these golden prospects.

Execution
Smarter Targeting of Smart Borrowers For communications rollout, our earlier analytical work became invaluable. Because the digital behaviour of our target was tracked in real time, we could serve them creative specifically tailored to their interest and Personal Loan motivations So instead of activating a standard PL search campaign that is typically one dimensional with generic messaging focusing only on rates, we used a combination of standard text ads and responsive search ads to minimize the spillover. By harnessing the power Responsive Search Ads, we could zoom into the deeper consumer motivations of the two groups we’d identified. To ensure highest impressions and clicks to our website, we optimized our campaign by increasing our spends during the weekdays to capture people who were dropping lead during working hours. This allowed stake a claim in share of impression at a whopping 91% in the search space. For HLB, 90% of the search budget was allocated to a highly focused pool of top performing keywords that generated 80% of the leads.

Effectiveness
Above & Beyond Expectations Instead of spreading our budget across multiple channels and by smartly sharpening HLB search marketing strategy, we achieved the highest PL approval rate in three years. • Achieved an average approval rate of 25% (with a peak of 30%); This was 6% higher than the industry benchmark • Loan Application value went up by 102% (RM259M vs previous year RM128M) • Loan applications went up by 75% (7,613 vs previous year 4,344) • Loan amount disbursed increased by 98% (RM34.7 vs previous year RM17.5) By these metrics, we successfully exceeded the KPIs set at the onset of the campaign showing an insight based, data driven search marketing strategy could lead to a tangible edge in a competitive marketplace.

2021 | |

KFC_Machine Woos Man

Advertiser: QSR Stores Sdn Bhd
Brand: KFC
Creative Agency: Ensemble
Credits: -

178_FINALIST_EC4_MACHINEWOOSMAN REC

Objective & Challenge
KFC is relaunching the iconic Popocorn Chicken with a +10% sales growth target. And we knew every time a product made a comeback, sales had been 7% lower versus its debut launch. It was an uphill task to achieve an ‘impossible’ +10% sales record.

Insight & Strategy
People today do not live for the future; They live in the ‘NOW’. Instant gratification is the new norm and people tends to flit between interests rapidly. So, how could we meet the +10% sales target & keep up with the vast number of everchanging interests? And our strategy is to focus on a ‘real consumer connect’ on YouTube. Why YouTube? Because it is a platform that gave consumers what they wanted, when they wanted it – instant gratification. With a +10% sales target, we needed to drive more footfalls which meant we need to drive maximum Relevant Reach. However, people could be moving from watching a KPop Video to Recipe for Ratatouille to eSports live competition. We could not be shifting our targeting strategies every day! In the context of Reach, YouTube brainer is a no brainer. But carpet bombing on YouTube was not a solution. We had to think leftfield to keep up with the plethora of interests. We developed a firstever campaign that could keep up with the everchanging human mind with the use of machine intelligence. We caught up with the speed of human minds.

Execution
Firstly, we performed cohort analysis on YouTube to study their journeys and unearth what people watched. Game of Thrones snippets, KPop, Avengers and much more. People did not just watch one video about a topic, they consumed everything from soundtracks to themes to even gameplays. And our shortlisting was done based on scale, we trimmed 2,847 themes to the 30 most popular themes. Next, we developed a Context detection engine, an AI tool to scrape every frame of every video on YouTube to detect invideo elements such as objects, faces & logos. The engine is coded to trigger ads (overlays & companions) when these invideo elements were detected. Lastly, we tailored precise creatives against the shortlisted 30 themes where we produced various witty ads. For example, a person watching a Game of Thrones would see an overlay banner that says, “A Lannister always pays his debts…. with Popcorn chicken”. Another example, a person watching Black Pink would see an overlay banner saying, “Forget Kpop, We got KfcPopcorn Chicken.” This allowed Media, Technology, Creative, Man and Machine to work in harmony.

Effectiveness
As a result of this, we were winning hearts and wallets. We overcame the historical deficit of 7% for comeback product & achieved +10% sales uplift. Observed a +5% uplift in awareness (YouGov), outpacing McDonald’s by +2pts. This campaign generated 58,000+ social mentions, increasing brand conversations by 16%. And we have done the undone from conceptualization to multiple tests, tight timeline and excellent collaboration.

2021 | |

Reverse Engineering sales funnel to close RM1.5Billion in Property Sales

Advertiser: Sime Darby Property
Brand: Sime Darby Property
Creative Agency: Kingdom Digital
Credits: -

Objective & Challenge
In the middle of 2020, when global markets were plunging, people all over the world were facing salary cuts and layoffs, investors being prudent about their investing plans, property market, as expected, took a major downturn as well. Specially in Malaysia, where property demand has been on a consistent decline due to oversupply of developments and unsold units, the agency was tasked to “sell property online”. With that, Sime Darby Property launched Spotlight 8 2020 campaign with a focus on featuring new launches and super deals at a different location every weekend for 3 months. Campaign also harnessed on government’srecent update on Housing Ownership Campaign to offer maximum savings with incredible offers to consumers. The campaign saw 4 New Launches with Elmina Green Three, Lumira 2, Embun 2, Serenia Ariya and Weekend Superdeals on other key developments.

Insight & Strategy
Putting our thinking hat on, we looked for data and insights that could give us goldmine of opportunities to reach out to the most relevant audience group “people who are still looking for property right in the middle of pandemic”. We studied hundreds of data points across different data channels, partners and providers i.e Search trend analysis, web behaviour, social chatters, aggregators insights – to analyse the key behavioural pattern changes during consumer journey in post covid era. This resulted in garnering some insights, which turned our strategy upside down. Despite a national lockdown, demand prices for property remained stable Mapping out increased in demand for property searches in KL and Selangor Identified new pockets of opportunities in the form of budding locations i.e Klang / Seremban corridors Search behaviour for investors versus home owner searches. Increase in affinity index for investment topics Rising trend for HOC and OPR related topics Despite what most analyst is saying, the above data point shows that there were sufficient demand in the market available to craft a strategic campaign and hit the mark. Strategy was simple – let the sales do the talking! We identified audience from the bottom of the funnel, those most likely to take advantage of the MCO and purchase undervalued properties. Based on the insights gather through tons of data points, we reversed our sales funnel to target bottom of the funnel audience and then generate awareness through social chatter. Online media was utilized to drive maximum impact as data showed decline in consumption of offline channels like OOH and on ground activations.

Execution
We started the campaign by identifying the hottest audiences in the market: Investors – provide them opportunities to invest in property with great price appreciation index Familiophiles – high converting segment for landed house Deal Hunters – audience looking for HOC rebates – high affinity Property Seekers – close the sales gap by introducing SDP’s lucrative Spotlight 8 deals With the above, sub segments in place – we launched our Campaign of the Year – Spotlight 8 2020. By reverse engineering the sales funnel, we executed the campaign cross: Search, Social and Display, by layering it with 4 key pillars: Audience, Location, Attribution, Automation Audience: Reaching out to the layered audience was ensured by putting data based hyper targeting in place. We put our data engine to study web behaviors and patterns to identify key attributes of each sub segments and then rank them as per different audience size. For example: Investors – Mutual Funds, Hedge Funds, Unit trusts, SIPs etc Familiophiles – Parents with Kids, Children’s product Shopping, Kindergarten (with age filters) Property seekers – Third party web behavioral data based on web visitation patterns i.e property guru, iproperty, competitors – Gamuda land, Ecoworld, SP Setia, Mah Sing etc. Location: Using polygon mapping/targeting – we mapped 12+ locations across Klang Valley to identify high disposable income audience with affinity towards property buying. Polygon targeting was to ensure that there was no data and audience spillover across less relevant target group Attribution: Using the AI based attribution data models, we ensured that right channel is being attributed the right conversions and throughout all touchpoints there is minimum data conversion overlapping Automation Due to consistent updates by government on slashing down ORPs and introducing HOC benefits, we needed to ensure that campaign is reported on a real time basis so as to incorporate sudden demand during any unforeseen day of the week. Campaign was automated with real time triggers to highlight any drastic changes in data over a short time span.

Effectiveness
Despite the different market and financial situation for Malaysians, Spotlight 8 2020 managed to achieve 4,229 leads, 6.5% higher than precedent year’s Spotlight 8 2019 with 3,971 leads. With an average 5,000 new user website traffic daily, we efficiently used awareness platforms with a high average CTR of 1.12%. With weekly optimization of ads and targeting, we managed to achieve a campaign ending of above 34% impressions share in google SEM and reached out high number of Malaysian users overall to have ad impressions above 100 Mil. Campaign not only drove exceptional media results and generated RM1.5 Billion+ in total sales booking. From business and revenue perspective, campaign managed to boost high takeup rates of its New Launches despite a challenging market 100% take up of both Serenia Ariya and Elmina Green 3 Phase 1 during their weekend launch respectively marked another stamp on the success of the campaign. 70% of the Lumira 2 (new launch) taken up at its launch weekend. 54 of 60 units of Phase 1 Embun 2 were taken up during the Spotlight 8 weekend from 19 to 20 September. On the success of campaign, SDP’s Group MD Dato’ Azmir Merican added: “The success of our launches shows that despite the soft property market, the sales campaign is wellreceived and that products we offer meet the current market demand for affordable and midrange products.”