Birra Moretti: compelling authenticity through video and rich media

Birra Moretti looked to extend this uniquely Italian experience beyond just one week. Using videos created from the Moretti Gran Tour, Birra Moretti looked to cement their reputation as an authentic Italian brand and encourage engagement among their target audience of ‘strivers’.

Birra Moretti wanted to measure authenticity against one of their closest competitors, which was challenging as they have been advertising in the UK for years. Comparatively, Birra Moretti launched their first UK campaign in June 2016, just three months prior to this campaign launch.

With a medium ranged budget, Mediavest Spark and LoopMe proposed PurchaseLoop as a unique AI solution which could drive engagement but also measure Birra Moretti’s authenticity against their competitor.

Objectives

• Encourage engagement (clicks, views, swipe) towards an embedded video using content from the Moretti Gran Tour.
• Actively target Birra Moretti’s target audience. Briefly summarised, this segment comprises of males in their 30s, with a busy and active lifestyle and young family.
• To improve the perception of Birra Moretti as an authentic Italian brand.

Strategy

LoopMe worked closely with Mediavest Spark to create a bespoke strategy for Birra Moretti, with rich media and video creative delivered in-app and across mobile web on phone and tablet.

LoopMe’s award-winning creative team built Birra Moretti branded rich media units to complement their short-form videos, ‘Farfalle’, ‘Frying Pan Pizza’ and ‘Moretti’. This encouraged engagement with clear calls to action to ‘Discover More’ and swipe or click between the three videos which were embedded within the rich media unit.

Utilising AI Engine to deliver the campaign to users who displayed a high probability of engaging with the videos (whether clicks or swipe) as per Birra Moretti’s strategic objectives. This was to ensure the best use of the budget as impressions were not wasted on users unlikely to engage.

As part of the initial booking, the campaign benefitted from the agency's latest product, PurchaseLoop (patent pending). PurchaseLoop uses look-alike artificial intelligence modelling to optimize video and rich media campaigns to brand metrics like brand affinity, purchase intent or in this case authenticity, in real time. This delivers measurable results against the metrics that brands care about, and which move consumers along the marketing purchase loop.

Prior to campaign launch, we asked users ‘Which would you consider to be the most authentic Italian beer?’, with the choice between Birra Moretti and their competitor.

For the users who responded with Birra Moretti’s competitor, a lookalike model was created to actively target these respondents. Using various data layers, unique to mobile such as lat/long data, location history, app usage, demographic and behavioural history, LoopMe’s mobile DMP built a specific audience model to target with Birra Moretti’s ads.

The outcome of each impression (did the user click, view, change their opinion on Birra Moretti) was then fed back into the AI engine, which incorporated the new learnings into its assumption set every 10 minutes, refining the optimisation process in real time through machine learning techniques.

Following excellent campaign performance, Mediavest Spark and Birra Moretti gave additional budget to the campaign.

Results

Pairing AI with mobile video and rich media offered Birra Moretti a strategy that offered impact and engagement. Further to this, utilising AI, meant it was possible to measure and optimise to Birra Moretti’s chosen brand metrics of authenticity, and deliver a significant uplift against their competitor.

Using PurchaseLoop, LoopMe could influence user opinion so Birra Moretti was considered a 32% more authentic brand than when the campaign began, as the below graph shows. While there should always be an uplift from control to exposed, the most significant rise is in the PurchaseLoop optimised results.

LoopMe was also able to decrease positive sentiment towards Birra Moretti’s competitor. In using lookalike models to target those who believed the other beer brand was more authentic, LoopMe drove a 20% decrease in the perception of authenticity. With a control of 65%, the exposed group recorded 63%, a decrease of 3%. However, when this group was targeted with Birra Moretti’s creative using AI, this dropped to 54%, a decrease of 20%.

Artificial intelligence modelling drastically narrowed the gap between the two beer brands from 30% to just 8% among Birra Moretti’s key target audience of strivers.

Using their mobile DMP, LoopMe reported back campaign performance and audience insights which showed that the campaign delivered to target.

The audience who believed Birra Moretti was the more authentic Italian brand fitted Birra Moretti’s ‘striver’ target audience; typically professionals, aged between 25–34, interested in content involving lifestyle, news, business, technology and were parents.

Cutting-edge creative drove engagement and delivered 3,334,054 impressions. Adding swipe effects in a carousel effect resulted in an impressive engagement rate of 13.08% (engagement here meaning swipe, click, sound on). The average click through rate for the videos was 2.55% and video completion rate 3.25%.

This is well above LoopMe’s internal benchmarks, with CTR 70% higher (benchmark 1.5%) and engagement rate exceeded by 87% (benchmark 7%).

As is standard for all LoopMe campaigns, artificial intelligence was used to optimise in real-time to those who were most likely to click on the advert. Due to this, CTR rose from 1.87% (control) to 2.55% (AI exposed), an increase of 53%.

With options to either click through to the next video or swipe, LoopMe found that users were more inclined to click for transitions (61%) than swipe (39%). LoopMe shared these insights to aid future planning for Birra Moretti as they continue to invest in advertising.

Through this campaign Birra Moretti were not only able to uplift traditional digital metrics, but also increase the main campaign objective of authenticity by 32%. LoopMe added more value to the impressions delivered through intelligent targeting and optimisation, therefore driving efficiency for Birra Moretti and Mediavest Spark.