Unilever smashes campaign goals and benchmarks while reaching new high-value audiences

TARGETING A NEW HIGH-VALUE AUDIENCE SEGMENT

Global consumer goods giant Unilever was keen to raise awareness of their new Lux hair product in Taiwan. They wanted to reach new, high-value audiences — specifically, the demographic Lux was designed for: busy, active women. So the company and its media agency, PHD, identified gym goers and others with an interest in exercise as the ideal target audience and partnered with The Trade Desk to reach them.

ACCESSING PREMIUM VIDEO INVENTORY ACROSS ALL PUBLISHERS

Unilever recognized that it needed to look beyond the major proprietary and user-generated content (UGC) platforms used in previous digital campaigns. Through The Trade Desk’s premium inventory marketplace, the company had access to high-quality inventory across all leading publishers. Their agency, PHD, bought over-the-top (OTT) and video inventory from multiple publishers and managed it all in one place.

What’s more, using the platform’s reach and frequency controls, PHD prevented consumers from being overexposed to Lux ads. These tools improved the consumer-viewing experience and increased the campaign’s efficiency.

The agency also tapped in to the power of The Trade Desk’s artificial intelligence engine, Koa™, for automatic optimizations and recommendations, which helped boost Unilever’s campaign performance on the fly.

TAPPING INTO THIRD-PARTY DATA TO IMPROVE TARGETING

With The Trade Desk’s premium data partnerships, PHD was able to target women in Taiwan aged 25 to 44, based on their purchasing, e-commerce, and behavioral data. The ads were further directed at women who browsed or purchased hair care and beauty products, and who viewed related content.

Additionally, Unilever expanded their reach to new high-value audiences, such as individuals who viewed exercise- and sports-related content as well as competitors’ products online. Using location data, PHD also reached women near gyms.

By leveraging these multiple data sources on a unified platform, PHD improved both targeting accuracy and reach for Unilever’s campaign, making the strategy far more effective than their previous use of UGC platforms.

BOOSTING ENGAGEMENT WITH WOOTAG'S INTERACTIVE VIDEO

To increase engagement with these audiences, Unilever leveraged The Trade Desk’s partnership and integration with Wootag, the interactive video and insights platform. This partnership enabled the company to target the right audiences with high-impact interactive video ads.

In particular, the platform allowed Unilever to use the powerful interactive video format SeekBar for the first time. SeekBar’s immersive video experience created even more opportunities to drive engagement and conversions within the target audiences.

SUCCEEDING WITH THIS CAMPAIGN AND THE ONES TO COME

With the help of The Trade Desk, Unilever increased awareness of the Lux brand and product, and reached 75 percent of the total audience pool available on the platform — exceeding the company’s goal by 20 percent. The video ads achieved a view-through rate (VTR) of 84 percent — 14 percentage points higher than the company’s goal.

The SeekBar ads were also highly effective, delivering a click-through rate (CTR) of 1.02 percent. This was significantly better than the market benchmark of 0.6 percent.

Just as importantly, Unilever can now target high-value audiences that it couldn’t reach before. For example, women who viewed exercise-related content and competitors’ products online were particularly responsive to the ads. Through detailed metrics, Unilever also discovered that LINE TV, the Asian OTT streaming service, provided the best results.

Unilever and PHD can now build on this knowledge to create even better-performing campaigns in the future.