Campaign Summary

Lipton launched a contextually targeted YouTube campaign during the pandemic, highlighting the benefits of green tea and other variants as healthy immunity boosters.

Strategy

Objective:

Despite living in the most technologically connected era of civilization, rates of loneliness have doubled since the 1980s, and is having an impact on mental health. The Lipton brand's purpose is to awaken the world to quality connections to fight hidden loneliness. For this, the brand launched a YouTube campaign with the aim of reaching audiences across the most relevant video content during the global pandemic and drive the messaging around the impact of social distancing on society. With this campaign, the brand highlighted the benefits of green tea and other variants as healthy immunity boosters. The campaign was geared towards impacting the purchase intent of the brand and driving sales and revenue. For this, engagement on brand creatives on mobile, click-through rate (CTR), view-through rate (VTR), and view rate were measured.

Target Audience:

For thousands of years, all over the world, tea drinking has been about friendship, hospitality, and sharing moments together. It can also provide an opportunity to take a few minutes to enjoy oneself and regain energy. For the campaign, Lipton reached out to decision-makers in all households in Egypt, including males and females between the ages of 25-50 who actively consume content on YouTube.

To further narrow down the audience, Lipton targeted niche categories like users engaging with content related to the pandemic such as masks, hygiene, and safety. It further reached out to users engaging with content related to activities such as walking, running, yoga, celebrating, relaxing, and dancing. Additionally, the brand focused on video content that featured emotionally happy and cheerful content. Lipton strived to be relevant during Ramadan with specific targeting around sweet and savory dishes during the festive month.

Creative Strategy:

To run this YouTube campaign across a highly niche audience, Lipton partnered with Silverpush to leverage their AI powered video advertising platform Mirrors, the world's first in-video context detection platform for video ad placement targeting. Mirrors enabled the brand to reach its consumers through content which was contextually relevant for the brand for this specific campaign.

Mirrors is the world's first technology to detect in-video contexts like faces, logos, objects, scenes, and emotions to bring relevancy with the content users consume for more contextually targeted ads. It moves away from keyword and affinity-based ad placements, and filters context relevant video content.
This helped in leveraging avenues such as banner and bumper ads along with 20- and 25-second in-stream ads and 6-second bumper ads, targeting content that the relevant audience was watching in real-time, not based on previous YouTube viewing behavior.

Lipton targeted content like masks, celebrity endorsers, and relevant activities and objects to reach its target audience. To amplify the brand association with self-care, videos with subject matter like walking, running, yoga, celebrating, relaxing, and dancing were targeted.

Context:

This was the first instance of Lipton using an innovative AI-powered in-video context detection technology for video advertising with the help of Silverpush. Earlier campaigns used traditional methodologies, which didn't account for audience fallout, and offered no specific targeting. Also, those campaigns didn't cater to the contextual targeting, and were based on past viewing behavior and keywords, which often leads to brand waste and sub-optimal engagement.

Execution

Overall Campaign Execution:

The brand reached out to the audience on content relating to health and hygiene to drive association with Lipton during the COVID-19 crisis while spreading festive cheer. It targeted the following in-video contexts:

1. Activities: Cleaning, wiping, boiling, washing hands, coughing, sneezing to increase relevance to content relating to the COVID-19 outbreak.
2. Logos: Hygiene and sanitization brands such as Fine Tissue, Zenia Tissue, Dettol, Harpic, Fairy, Finish, Pril, and Mr. Muscle and objects like a mop, cleaning brush, cleaning cloth, hand sanitizer, and tissues.
3. Self-care: To amplify the brand association with taking care of oneself, videos with topics like walking, running, yoga, celebrating, relaxing, and dancing were targeted.
4. Emotions: Taking advantage of facial expressions, emotions like happiness and cheerfulness were added.
5. Ramadan: Lipton targeted content featuring sweets and savory dishes during the festive month, along with fast food and well-known brands like Sprite, 7 Up, Fanta, Mirinda, Tang, Nestle Water, Evian Water, and Dasani. It also included videos like food reviews, vlogs, and recipes.

Mobile and other second-screening devices like tablets were central to fulfill the campaign's two key objectives of increasing reach and building brand awareness by countering the competition. With growing video consumption over mobile devices, Mirrors' AI-powered contextual targeting technology and campaign creatives were geared towards mobile devices. Videos that had high viewership on mobile devices were targeted, creative formats that were primed for mobile-driven CTRs and VTRs were used, and 65 percent of all budget spend happened on the mobile medium.

Mirrors went a step ahead in targeting highly niche audiences with its in-video context detection, narrowing down affinities to health and wellness, people interested in sanitization, and lifestyle and beauty related content.

Business Impact (including context, evaluation, and market impact)

The brand had executed campaigns with similar objectives prior to using the real-time sync and context detection technology. Lipton had been struggling with market share for the past couple of years due to strong competition as well as the rising affinity for coffee over tea.

Results of the campaign:

• It reached around 1.41 million users, with 1.36 ads per user.
• In-steam videos were effective in delivering brand communication, recording a 1.4 times greater view rate than the benchmark.
• Smartphones were the most favorable devices. Ads on mobile phones fared better over both views and clicks.
• Lipton Green Tea penetration grew by 10 percent.

Due to the seamless and relevant nature of this contextual targeting experience, overall brand awareness increased by 60 percent, indicating the effectiveness of the campaign and the use of technology for it.