2015 Bronze Best Use of Programmatic

Periscopix

OVO Energy

The Surround Sound Approach

Campaign Overview

With simple plans, green energy and no-fuss customer service, OVO Energy offered a better energy provision. The provider set out to increase its brand awareness, drive customers to switch from the ‘Big Six’ energy companies, use attribution to understand the true value of different marketing channels and integrate its strategy across paid media. The campaign was able to dynamically react to changes in the market and feed insights and actionable recommendations back into the business, giving OVO an ongoing campaign that greatly improved impressions, clicks and conversions.

Strategy

Using a programmatic strategy, OVO developed an advanced Surround Sound Approach involving cutting-edge use of the DoubleClick Stack. This included dynamic display banners, results-based brand awareness, USP-based remarketing and cross-platform targeting. Driving budget allocations by measuring the impact of its other social activity, OVO created a ‘surround sound’ remarketing approach that tied up users across paid and unpaid channels, including reaching into YouTube and Facebook. Search and programmatic link-up was key to a 360 degree approach to the campaign. Segmentation, qualification and remarketing across departments led to a strategy that constantly recycled insights through optimisation, with business insights fed back into OVO to inform its activity across marketing and customer acquisition divisions.

Creativity

An audience-focused creative strategy produced three sets of dynamic creative based on qualified analysis, allowing innovative creative design to be developed for in-app and mobile PAYG activity. To access high quality, high impact inventory, OVO grew its spend on individually negotiated private deals, building from nothing into a separate £65,000 per month campaign. To measure the impact of these deals, a new reporting strategy used separate KPIs to track performance, including viewability and impression volume. The attribution approach drew all channels into DoubleClick Stack via an array of techniques, including natural search data, Google Analytics linking and click trackers. This gave a view of OVO’s entire digital activity, enabling effective spend across all channels. Uniquely, this also included unpaid interactions such as native Twitter and Facebook.

Results

Of the 180,000 prospects who were enticed to click on OVO’s ads, the campaign converted nearly 12,000 to switch to the provider, at a well below target cost per acquisition of £35.37. An overall click through rate of 0.079% was 58% higher than the industry average, with constant optimisation delivering a 154% rise in impressions, 118% increase in clicks and 66% improvement in conversions. Insight gained during the campaign led to a time-lag based remarketing strategy, with 91% of full customer switches occurring either within the first day of interaction or not for at least 5 days. This will further inform frequency capping, bidding strategies and creative messaging to allow OVO to reach prospects at the most influential point in their path to conversion.