The client:
Vodafone Group is a British multinational telecommunications company. Its registered office and global headquarters are in Newbury, Berkshire, England. It predominantly operates services in Asia, Africa, Europe and Oceania.
As of January 2023, it owns and operates networks in 21 countries, with partner networks in 47 further countries. Its Vodafone Global Enterprise division provides telecommunications and IT services to corporate clients in 150 countries.
The problem:
Every year, Vodafone experiences a decline in Pay As You Go customer acquisition and usage due to the shrinking market opportunity. Their objective was to incrementally drive customer acquisition through creative media executions to reignite at scale.
The solution:
Playrcart are pioneers of Transactional Advertising and have developed a solution that enables any brand to convert their digital assets into instantly transactional ones. From viewing the ad content to final checkout, the consumer doesn’t leave the ad or publisher environment. This allows brands to sell anywhere across the open web, social and livestream formats and allows them to capture first party, customer consented data.
Vodafone and JustPremium, a GumGum company utilised Playrcart’s technology to enhance their consumer experience and to drive customer acquisition. This activation shortened the path of conversion for the user by introducing the ability to link customer engagement within an ad unit directly with Vodafone’s CRM platform, in this case LeadScale. A global first for the Telecoms industry.
JustPremium and Playrcart partnered to deliver a truly transactional desktop skin unit. This integrated solution allowed new customers to simply fill in the data capture form, order a free SIM card directly from within the ad unit, during the key moment of attention, driving intent to purchase.
The result:
Crossing the boundary between branding and performance allowed Vodafone customers to engage with JustPremium’s high impact desktop skin format and once enticed, order their Pay As You Go free SIM from within the ad unit. They didn’t have to experience re-direction to the website. The full funnel approach delivered on both brand-led, and performance-led metrics.
Performance – Conversions:
The addition of the Playrcart unit had a strong impact in driving conversions within the Ad as well as driving users to the main Vodafone website. When we compared the amount of conversions that occurred from within the Desktop Skin to those that were achieved via the Vodafone website, we found that conversions increased by 11X.
Performance – Awareness & Engagement:
This formats’ core proposition was to drive awareness and engagement. The campaign delivered a massive 2.17% CTR – exceeding the average benchmark of 1% that is usually delivered by JustPremium on Vodafone desktop skin campaigns.
Vodafone also had this measured by Lumen attention research and found the below results –
- Dwell Time – 98% of respondents noticed the skin for an average of 3.1secs, this is 2.2x longer than desktop display formats.
- Attention – 3.5x what you would expect from a desktop display.
- Brand recall – spontaneous recall was 9.6x higher and prompted recall 2.7x higher when compared to standard desktop display results.
- Summary – A third of the sample recalled seeing the SIM card order form, this is the best recall they saw when comparing to other interactive features tested for Vodafone.
The programmatic skin delivered on attention, dwell time and user interaction, while the transactional element streamlined prospective new customers’ user journey into three easy steps within the ad unit itself. Ultimately, this element of the ad unit contributed towards incremental SIM orders and also driving traffic to the website, as some users will prefer to do this on the website.
This campaign took a collaborative approach, involving different internal and external stakeholders from creative, to privacy and security, to channel specialists and brand directors that ultimately enabled delivery of objectives and KPIs.
The campaign won the Best Programmatic Campaign at Performance Marketing Awards 2022 and was a Finalist for The Drum Awards Digital Advertising 2022.
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