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Performance marketing triumphs over static – putting digital out-of-home to the test

Technology & Data

Performance marketing triumphs over static – putting digital out-of-home to the test

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A Scentre Group BrandSpace campaign developed for Optus sought to prove the advantage of applying anonymous face detection to serve contextually-relevant creative to various customer segments.

This article was sponsored by Scentre Group to let readers know about its new Marketing case study, ‘Screen test’ »

The launch of the new Samsung Galaxy S10 was an event that Optus didn’t want to miss. The 10th anniversary smartphone model was sure to be a customer hit.

In the competitive telco market, one thing that never changes is the fact that customers always want more from their carrier. Optus’ consumer data showed that a significant number of mobile users are unhappy with their current telco – whether that be due to value, content, network or poor customer service. They feel trapped, paying more than they should for data and content they don’t use, and are underwhelmed by the network experience that comes with competitively priced plans. 

In terms of its marketing, Optus plans its retail out-of-home media to align with priority Optus stores for mobile phone sales. Many of these stores are situated in Scentre Group’s platform of 41 Westfield living centres, making these environments critical to overall success.

The Scentre Group BrandSpace SmartScreen network –  a media portfolio located within Westfield living centres, designed and developed by Scentre Group five years ago, offers many brands the opportunity to reach customers moving through Westfield environments in a range of ways. Optus wanted to use the network to drive interest and foot traffic to its stores for the Galaxy S10 product. Beyond merely serving a range of product ads, it wanted to test out the network’s creative capabilities. 

Brandspace Audience 'Selfie' page 6

Via its partnership with attention analytics solutions provider Quividi, the Scentre Group BrandSpace SmartScreen network enables advertisers to anonymously detect faces and serve contextual content based on estimated age, gender and facial characteristics (facial hair and sunglasses, for example). These capabilities enabled Optus to serve a variety of different creative to various target customer segments. 

Scentre Group group general manager of partner experience, Bill Burton, describes these high-tech, real-time and contextually-curated capabilities as “performance marketing principles”. The question was whether the project would deliver a positive result. 

In working with Optus to answer that question, Scentre Group developed a full-scale A/B test. Ten Westfield living centres were chosen to run the contextually-catered content, and 10 others – which married well to the first 10 in terms of profile and audience – were chosen to serve a control message. 

Optus segmented its audience into young females, young males, families, mature females and mature males. It highlighted the Galaxy S10 offer with a proof point for each audience, such as ‘data the whole family can share’ for families and an Optus Sport ‘Stream every 2018/’19 Premier League match Live’ message for young males. 

Quividi - Audience Image

The control creative, on the other hand, ran a ‘price and device’ message for the duration of the campaign. 

The results confirmed the massive advantage of the performance marketing principles applied to the environment.

Scentre Group and Quividi were able to capture a rigorous set of data to help understand the differences in outcomes. The content was viewed at a higher rate, engaged with at a higher rate and there was stronger CTA across centres in which Scentre Group applied the performance marketing principles to than those where traditional advertisements were played. 

Personalised creative for each target segment outperformed the ‘control’ creative. The targeted creative had:

  • up to six times more viewers per play
  • a 23% increase in attention for the personalised creative
  • 29% attention time uplift from the target audiences, and 
  • 32% more efficient overall target reach.

Perhaps surprisingly, mature males and females were the most responsive to targeted creative, with a 56% and 82% increase time respectively. This demonstrates that developing creative specifically targeted to mature audiences resonates strongly and can drive significant uplifts in performance. 

Brandspace Audience 'Family' creative

Further fine-tuning the effectiveness of the performance marketing samples, Scentre Group was able to validate the effectiveness of mid-campaign optimisation. “It sounds simple, but that’s actually quite a good thing to prove,” says Burton.

“Mid-campaign, we were able to learn from what was happening, optimise the campaign and creative that was delivered and see quite a step change in results.” Daily optimisation based on the previous day’s learning saw an improvement in results.

For Scentre Group’s Burton, the campaign demonstrated the power of collaborative partnerships. “We have put a lot of time and effort into establishing this network and building the ad technology systems to have the available platform… but unless we have a brave, engaged, thoughtful, intelligent client who wishes to research this world, understand it and then take advantage of the opportunities that are unlocked from performance marketing at scale, it’s just a network with lots of smarts.”

Get the full story of how Scentre Group unlocked real-time, contextual, content-based targeting in Westfield Living centres around the country »

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