2022 Silver Data and Insight

Agency: MediaCom

Client: Sky

Campaign Name: Sky Glass

Campaign Overview

Sky was launching its biggest and most innovative product in 15 years - new streaming TV service Sky Glass. But there was a big challenge: building a prospect pool suitable for the product to supercharge its sales volume.

Strategy

With the industry shift to a privacy-first landscape, MediaCom admitted that locating in-market audiences was a bigger challenge than it had ever faced. At launch, only 6% of people who started the Sky Glass configurator were available to be retargeted programmatically.

What felt like a glimpse into a cookie-less future led to a reassessment of the agency’s data ecosystem for a new way to target audiences, and quickly capitalise on demand. The team looked beyond a singular tech ecosystem for its retargeting strategy; applying an agnostic approach to select vendors whose technology didn't rely on third-party cookies.

The different data sources were combined within Sky's cloud environment to power addressable media buys and increase overall reach. A proprietary hill-climbing algorithm was built to dedupe consumers and prioritise communication across activation platforms, reducing media waste.

Finally, the agency used federated learning within Sky's digital estate to increase visibility of consumers who started their journey to surface the product bundle from an original site visit, with a relevant offer to drive sales.

Creativity

To identify additional consumers who were on the hunt for TVs, the agency used Google's 'Messy Middle' research to create quantifiable typologies to weight communications and creative messaging to Fast, Medium and Slow prospects.

The Sky Glass strategy worked across addressable media to deliver truly personalised creative to the consumer. The shopping experience included 45 product variants, 61 landing pages and thousands of message variations to dynamically target people with the most appealing messages:

FAST - Captured the nation's attention by using distinctive and innovative executions to drive fame and awareness through broadcast media.

MEDIUM - To increase consideration, personalisation and relevant messaging was delivered through digital-first creative for TV hardware prospect segments who were keen to understand how these aspects would improve their viewing experience.

SLOW - To pull in-market prospects back to Sky Glass, the campaign advanced the shoppable strategy across Meta and Twitter, diversifying across new social platforms including Snap and Pinterest; and unlocking the power of first-party data on the big screen through connected TV.

Results

Pivoting the data strategy gave greater consumer visibility, growing the retargeting pool by 743%.

In turn, this had a massive impact on media, enabling the campaign to deliver 244% more impressions, helping to increase journey starts by 126% and sales by 196%. Overall, this was Sky's most successful product launch ever.

The Team
MediaCom - Oliver Jones-Evans, Account Director - Laura Baldrick, Senior Associate Director - Sophie Brideson, Digital Director - Alex Devereux, Account Manager - Jack Lynch, Senior Associate Director, Data Strategist - Alex Glover, Digital Director
Sky - Kirsty O'Connell, Senior Digital Marketing Manager - Reeves Krzysztofer, Digital Programmatic Manager - Charlotte Harvey, Graduate Marketing - Julia Barry, Digital Marketing Director - Nicholas Smith, Head of Digital Marketing