Facing the misconceptions head-on around electric vehicles (EVs) among Italians, such as price and time efficiencies, with a brand awareness campaign showcasing Audi’s EV lineup.
Using a precise data-driven targeting approach to reach high-value audiences.
Simultaneously running a brand lift study, Inferred Brand Intent (IBI), to measure audience’s perception of Audi’s EVs.
“The output has shown that our campaign generated a positive impact on the campaign’s core message.”
Sebastiano Vissani
Programmatic Campaign Manager, PHD Italy
Driving awareness of Audi’s range of electric vehicles
Italians are famous for their love of cars. But they are perceived to be slow to embrace electric vehicles (EVs) with concerns around price, recharging time and lack of charging stations. The challenge for Audi was to create a campaign that would capture the hearts of Italians and help them fall in love with the carmaker’s EV lineup.
When Audi launched its creatives promoting the features of its EV range, it had two key objectives: raise awareness and encourage the audience to interact with the ads; then measure the impact on brand lift – tracking whether the audience visited Audi’s website to learn more about its EV models.
Using a data-driven approach to help reach the right audience
The team knew that data would be the driving force of the campaign, which is why they partnered with us. We helped Audi develop a more precise targeting strategy, building audience segments made up of high-income individuals with an interest in automotive, luxury vehicles, and EVs. We drew insights from our data partners and contextual segments – and used Audi’s own retargeting data, gathered from its previous video campaign.
In terms of inventory, we set the ads to deliver on a variety of different private marketplaces, including green deals from our partner, Scope3, whose mission is to decarbonise media and advertising.
Beyond click-through rate (CTR), the team wanted to gather insights to help better understand the audience’s brand perception, as well as measure spontaneous web searches – for Audi EVs and even the EV market at large. So, we helped set up a brand lift study through our platform partner and activated their Inferred Brand Intent (IBI) feature to monitor the audience’s browsing behaviours after the ad exposure.
Audi’s campaign reached over 15 million unique users and, thanks to our precise audience targeting, delivered a CTR 21% above the benchmark.
The brand lift study showed that the campaign had a high impact score, while on metrics such as ad recall, ad perception, attribution, and ad likeability, the results ranked mostly in the top 5% or 10% of similar campaigns.
The IBI study measured over 98,000 conversions across the campaign’s flight, well above the team’s expectations. All of which suggests many Italians are starting to feel the spark for electric vehicles.
Want to discover how you can use data to reach the right audience and measure impact? Contact us or speak with your account manager at The Trade Desk today!