Digital advertising regulations are a relatively new and growing area in Europe and whilst currently less robust than other channels, they are evolving with an expectation that they will continue to tighten up.

The latest regulations for digital in Europe were introduced in February 2015 by the IAB, surrounding Native advertising. The guidelines call for greater transparency through clear and prominent signing of any ‘paid’ editorial making it easier for consumers to spot native advertisements.

Whilst the regulations were not in play during our European campaign, we always advise clients to be transparent across paid editorial so had adhered to these same stipulations.

Regulations are good for the branded content sector. Content should be consumer first, and evidence shows, as long as you provide a real value exchange to your audience for consuming your content, be it entertainment, education, utility or reward, there is no detrimental effect of having the brand present.

For this campaign specifically, given it involved numerous talent, we had to ensure we had the appropriate license and usage rights to host the content across all Lexus owned digital platforms and leverage in paid digital advertising across the 10 European markets we worked with.

Knowing our audience spent most time on digital, curating content via their newsfeeds, we developed a robust digital ecosystem comprising +150 assets, leveraging local influencers and paid native tactics to seed content within contextually relevant environments; increasing receptivity and shares.

Key stages to publishing NX-Perspectives:

1. Constructing a responsive digital gallery to house the series, encouraging deeper exploration of projects and drive shares.

2. Leveraging influential networks, gaining endorsement from media influencers of the art world to credibly seed the series through +300 editorial and social integrations across bloggers and publishers relevant to each artwork e.g. ID fashion publisher seeded NX-Materialised.

3. Artist’s generated advocacy from their existing fanbase sharing projects across their own social networks.

4. Delivering additional reach beyond influencers, using programmatic advertising to efficiently scale content targeted to the audience across desktop and mobile. We aligned each artwork and format to appropriate fashion, music and design environments.

Through delivering meaningful, high quality and credible content experiences, we convinced our younger European audience to spend a total amount of time equivalent to 4.5 years with a brand they had previously not considered.

• 224 million impressions and 9.6 million video views delivering targeted, contextual reach across 10 markets, positioning the NX at the heart of progressive design in Europe.

• Post campaign research showed 16% increase in positive brand perception amongst their audience with perception of the Lexus NX as a fashion-forward, distinctively designed car doubling after viewing the content.

• With +230,000 trackable social actions driven by engaging influencers to seed the NX-Perspectives series, the compelling content also got our audience talking with a 10% increase in social conversation mentioning Lexus during the campaign, and a 5% increase in conversations associating them with art and design.

• The robust and targeted publishing strategy delivered real ROI where for every €1 invested, Lexus saw €1.83 in media value returned.

• Across Europe, before the car was fully available, 4.5 months of orders had already been taken for the NX, and by the end of year Lexus had smashed their projected sales by 41%!