Connecting with fans.
Havas and Adobe team to create and deliver real-time, data-driven personalized ads using Adobe Advertising Cloud Creative.
31%
Increase in revenue with more subscriptions
Objectives
Capture the attention of sports fans to encourage greater brand engagement
Deliver dynamic, personalized advertisements for a major sports organization
Minimize the cost and effort of creating dozens of ad variations
Results
Created hundreds of ads through automation
75% Greater ROI from lower costs through Adobe support
31% Increase in revenue with more subscriptions
Used advanced segmentation for greater personalization
"Adobe Advertising Cloud Creative was our top choice to not only create personalized ads that draw in fan and connect them with their favorite teams, but also create ads that are data-driven and informed by real-time in-market results"
Michael Kaushanky
Executive Vice President, Chief Data Office, Havas
Building a strong team
Digital advertisements are common today, with ads appearing on almost every website. As a result, brands need to do more to make their digital campaigns stand out to viewers. Dynamic, personalized ads can help cut through the static and directly engage people, but these ad campaigns are often more complicated to manage.
Fortunately, this complexity is no issue for Havas, the main media brand in the Havas Group. Havas operates on a mission of helping its clients connect with customers through data, insight, and collaboration. The agency’s specialized teams work together to offer integrated, agile, and responsive client support.
It was this level of expertise and professionalism that led a major sports organization to contact Havas about a new digital campaign. The organization wanted to create ads that would get fans excited about their teams and encourage them to tune in to broadcast games, buy merchandise, and watch extra content online. The client was looking for ads that would be unique, with personalized elements to connect with loyal fans across the country and a real-time countdown clock to get fans ready for the next game.
Havas knew that it needed a top partner to help fulfill the client’s request. Havas turned to Adobe to bring expert insight to complex campaign management. With the client, the client’s creative agency, Adobe, and Havas working collaboratively, the digital campaign successfully attracted the attention of audiences and encouraged deeper fan engagement.
“To meet all of our client’s goals, we needed to work with a solution capable of delivering dynamic ad content,” says Michael Kaushansky, Executive Vice President, Chief Data Officer at Havas. “After extensive evaluation of dynamic creative optimization platforms, Adobe Advertising Cloud Creative was our top choice to not only create personalized ads that draw in fans and connect them with their favorite teams, but also create ads that are data-driven and informed by real-time in-market results.”
“Using multiple levels of audience segmentation, we have a greater chance of showing visitors a team that they support. This helps to catch fans’ attention and encourage engagement with the sports brand.”
Chris Merolle
Director of Analytics, Havas
Reaching fans
Sports fans are loyal to their team, and if their team is playing, they want to know. The sports organization came up with the idea for a unique digital campaign for both desktop and mobile that would alert fans to upcoming games by showing images of each team along with a countdown to the start of the game. Once the game started, the messaging would change to display the network and encourage fans to start watching right away.
Creating each banner manually would have been expensive and unmanageable. There were normally more than a dozen different matchups every week, resulting in around 300 different banners that had to be created during the season.
Developing dynamic ad content allows Havas to automate content creation and quickly deliver ads in bulk. The creative process started with the client working with its creative agency on a mockup of the proposed ads. Once the framework of the ad was finalized, Adobe Advertising Cloud Creative could dynamically scale and pull the correct team assets and start time for each game into an animated ad for each game. Adobe took over for the final step, using its expertise in dynamic creative optimization to run the campaign smoothly.
Working with Adobe Advertising Cloud and Adobe Analytics Cloud allowed Havas to do more than just use automation to build ads. Leveraging the audience segments in Adobe Audience Manager, Havas personalized the ads to better attract fans. A fan’s number one team isn’t always the local one. They might watch the team they grew up with, or follow a parent’s favorite team. If Audience Manager identified the user as someone with a known favorite team, it would send that information to Adobe Advertising Cloud Creative and display the matchup featuring that team. Otherwise, Adobe Audience Manager would pull geographical information to display the user’s local team.
Havas also leveraged Audience Manager to ensure that the correct images of a fan’s favorite team render on dynamic banner ads for the sports organization’s digital subscription service. With a subscription, fans gain access to exclusive footage, replays, and archives over desktop, mobile, and tablets. Personalization has led to dramatic results for subscriptions, increasing basic subscriptions 20% year-over-year and lifting premium subscription conversion by 44%. The result has been a 31% year-over-year increase in product revenue.
“Using multiple levels of audience segmentation, we have a greater chance of showing visitors a team that they support,” says Chris Merolle, Director of Analytics at Havas. “This helps to catch fans’ attention and encourage engagement with the sports brand.”
Working together as a team
Adobe experts worked closely with Havas to bring the campaign to life. While Havas guided the project, coordinated efforts, and provided direction, Adobe supported the project with best practices and advice, and helped make sure that the campaign would run as smoothly as possible. Despite the complexity of the matchup campaign project with its many moving parts, the ads were ready to run in just a few weeks thanks to the cooperation and teamwork.
“We wanted to help Havas and the client succeed,” says Charlie Northrop, Senior Manager, Advertising Cloud Creative Services, Adobe. “We were happy to join the team and help Havas work smarter, not harder.”
“Campaigns as complex as these would have been nearly impossible with traditional methods,” says Kaushansky. “We estimate that we saved hundreds of hours of labor and tens of thousands of dollars in costs, helping us increase the return on investment for premium subscriptions by 75%. By taking some of the technical tasks off of our hands, Adobe allowed us to focus on realizing the client’s vision and make this campaign a reality.”
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