Media agencies should invent answers through content: Mindshare UK CEO explores Cannes Lions winning Kleenex campaign
This summer, Mindshare picked up a Gold award in the media category at this year's Cannes Lion Festival of Creativity. Mark Creighton, CEO of Mindshare UK explains some of thinking behind the data led campaign that aimed to help combat the UK's regular flu epidemics by targeting affected geographic regions in real-time.
If media is to continue being perceived as a business solution to the challenges that our clients wrestle with, agencies must move away from the fragmented answers that are created by talking about media channels, rather than solutions. In a new media landscape defined by constant evolution in technology, content and people, agencies must foster a more collaborative culture to invent the answers that will enable clients to be successful in tough times.
Our recent Gold Lion at Cannes for our work with Kleenex demonstrates the power of such a collaborative approach.
Every year Kleenex Balsam’s Cold and Flu campaign ran from October to February, but during 2011 we experienced the hottest October in 100 years, meaning low cases of cold and flu.
Communications therefore needed to be more adaptive, to be live during cold and flu outbreaks, the optimum time to get consumers to purchase Kleenex Balsam. We needed a flexible plan that could react to the unpredictable cold and flu seasons.
Five years ago, when ill, we headed to the local doctor, but today we live in a culture of self-diagnosis. This became the pivotal insight that enabled Kleenex to revolutionise their approach to marketing.
Firstly we validated a concrete relationship between previous cold and flu related keyword searches with previously released government data on outbreaks, on a local level. We found a robust statistical correlation between the two. We then built a real-time adaptive planning tool that dictated regional media activity for Kleenex Balsam that feeds directly off of cold and flu related search.
The search data was the lynchpin to the success of this project. Google Trends only allows limited insight into the top ten or so regions in the UK based on high search density. Our solution was to create a paid search campaign, allowing us to analyse cold and flu data on a much more granular local level than Trends would. We bid on cold and flu related keywords with the intention of losing, we only wanted to see the data. We then plugged this activity into a planning tool.
The planning tool was a digital platform that was built on a set of rules, splitting the Kleenex Balsam marketing budget depending on where and when there were cold and flu outbreaks. Access was then provided to the PR, creative and experiential agencies, informing them of their necessary activity dependent on outbreaks. Our buying teams therefore adopted a more flexible / nimble approach to trading, following a week by week approach, ensuring TV spots were turned on if specific regions were ‘high’, radio activity was live and digital activity was specifically geo-targeted based on locations with high incidences of cold and flu. The tool also influenced other agencies, if there was high level outbreak in Manchester then the experiential agency would know exactly how much collateral up-weight for distribution. If there was no outbreak in Cardiff, then we would pause spending in that area.
This allowed us to target consumers when our advertising was most relevant to them. Our tool can predict flu outbreaks with over 80 per cent accuracy. Our adaptive approach has increased our campaign effectiveness by 50 per cent. More importantly, Kleenex Balsam enjoyed a year-on-year increase in sales of 40 per cent.
Our solution to the Kleenex challenge came as a consequence of bringing analytical and creative people together, to determine how digital insight could inform how we execute overall media activity more effectively. At the heart of this collaboration was the desire to create a solution that was adaptive, enabling Kleenex to effectively respond to changes in consumer behaviour. While that sounds simple, the correlation of multiple data sources brought the risk of an impenetrable mass of data from which it would be difficult for our media planning and buying teams to respond to. Our Creative Technologists therefore invented a simple dashboard that took the analytics and algorithms that powered our solution and developed a simple, low friction technology that could empower the execution of Kleenex’s media.
This approach can be applied to all types of communication challenges, not just those faced by Kleenex. With our retail clients we are exploring the impact of weather and temperature upon footfall in stores or propensity to buy specific products. From this we can target media and product messaging in more effective ways. As media buying becomes more programmatic and enhances our ability to target consumers more effectively and in real time, we can move beyond the constraints of TV regions and traditional demographics, to more granular targeting that further minimises the wastage of a client’s budget.
This work crystallises the inventive and adaptive way in which a modern media agency needs to work if it is going to fully exploit the power that media has to answer our client’s business challenges.