Situation:

Every year, Google gathers its top TV advertisers at the Think Event to convince them of how YouTube and digital can be an effective way to build brands and drive sales.

Every year, 300+ advertisers attend the event, listen to our presentations and go back to buying TV as they normally do.

Brief:

Find a way to transform the event into an experience that would change our clients behaviour for real.

Objectives:

- Reach advertisers coming to the event with our ads.

- Prove to TV advertisers that YouTube works.

- Incorporate them into the presentation and event flow.

- Have at least one client agree to put our learnings into practice.

The creative idea was to advertise a fake product to our advertisers before the annual Google Think Event and ask advertisers during the event whether or not they knew the brand.

The whole event would be structured around the fake launch, showing advertisers how a data-driven, YouTube-first approach can be effective at driving results fast.

The strategy and creative idea were one and the same. We could not have targeted advertisers without a product.

The strategy did, however, influence the product. Because we created personalised ads based on the day of the week, we decided that the product too should last a whole week, with one portion for each business day.

On weekends, we ran a reminder to get more Stikitos before the work week began.

Our target audience were the advertisers coming to the event: health-conscious business professionals, that spend a large part of their day in the office.

Due to privacy policies, we could not target them using our mailing list. So, for the idea to work, we would have to treat advertisers as regular customers. We would need to aim wide enough to reach them, but specific enough so we wouldn't burn the budget in a few days.

We defined our audience as "marketers in Moscow". We geofenced the campaign to Moscow and used a mix of custom affinity (interested in Marketing) and intent (visited the top 100 industry portals).

The strategy delivered the desired outcome with high reach and frequency, low CPMs, best-in-class Brand Lift Survey results, and high engagement rates.

We had exactly 3 months before the event, so implementation was key.

If we didn't have results to show on stage or if advertisers in the audience hadn't seen our ads, the whole thing would be pointless.

Campaign ran on YouTube, with 11 video assets and 3 different formats.

To drive awareness, we ran five 6-second ads (Bumpers).

To drive consideration, we ran 5 personalized ads (TrueView).

To maximize reach, we ran a reminder on weekends (TrueView for Reach).

All efforts led to a teasing product webpage.

We spent the first week approving the idea and the budget internally.

3 weeks developing the product (brand, packaging, site, trademark).

3 weeks in production (scripts, shooting, post-production).

1 week for campaign setup and optimization.

3 weeks running the campaign (up until the eve of the event).

Ads were seen by millions of people, including half of the advertisers

In just 3 weeks, the fake product was known and desired by millions.

According to the Brand Lift Survey:

2.302.655 people saw our ads.

1.498.422 were aware of the brand.

624.026 people considered buying it.

152.618 people visited the product's website.

Stikitos tied the category leader on Google Trends.

But most importantly:

Half of the advertisers attending the event had seen our ads.

88% of them said they would apply the learnings to future media and marketing plans.

PepsiCo agreed to start immediately a campaign based on the Stikitos framework. Their campaign was such a success that the case was presented at the Digital Brand Day Event (https://digitalbrandday.ru/dbd2021).

Clients from other markets, in India and APAC, are replicating the experiment in their markets.