The Power of Personalisation - Unlocking the Door to your Audience
Thursday 17 November 2022
Imagine you are walking down the busy high street where you live. Passing by a shop you hear someone shout your name. It gets your attention; you turn to listen to what they have to say, and they ask you to come in and take a look.
You then walk into the shop and see a whole rail of clothes that are solely your size and within your price range. You pick up a couple of t-shirts and take them to the till to purchase. A few days later your friend asks where you got the t-shirts. You mention the shop, how well it knew you and how it had exactly what you wanted when you wanted it.
Now, imagine the same scenario. You are walking down the same street and this time someone shouts ‘hey you!’ it gets your attention but you are suspicious of their intentions. They tell you about a shop, however, this shop is in the next city 60 miles away. “It’s excellent” they say.
You decide to take the risk and make the long journey to the shop. When you get there none of the clothes are your size or style and they are also out of your price range. You leave without buying anything and feel like you have been misled. Your friend is in the market for new clothes, asks for recommendations and you can’t think of any.
Forgive the overly dramatic introduction, but this is a perfect way to frame how a strategic, audience targeted and personalised audio advertising campaign can shift the dial on recall, perception and intent of users towards brands. Personalisation has been in the digital audio space for a few years, however, it is only now we have been able to measure its effectiveness. Partnering with the car insurance brand Mustard.co.uk, Octave Audio used Adswizz’s in-house DCO tool to build dynamically targeted creatives based on age and location.
What is DCO I hear you ask? It stands for Dynamic Creative Optimisation, where multiple variations of a creative are stitched together and served to a listener based on their characteristics. Of course, DCO can be poorly done, and there are many pitfalls you can stumble into. Using unreliable third-party data points, running overly complex ad combinations and not having a clear success criterion can all negatively affect your campaign performance.
In the case of Octave and Mustard, the User would hear a different insurance quote, age range and location based on the first-party data that matches those fields. We then ran a ‘smart brand uplift study’ by our third-party research partner Veritonic.
The results were astounding. Those exposed and served with the DCO creative targeted to Birmingham aged 34-54 had a +26ppt lift in awareness, +47ppt lift in favourability and +33ppt lift in purchase intent. This was an increase in non-DCO, non-localised ad exposure by +14ppt in brand awareness, +14ppt favourability and +5ppt in intent.
Being able to prove the efficacy of personalised audio advertising for the first time is a huge milestone for an industry historically lacking in measurable engagement metrics. Moving the dial so significantly across these three brand uplift metrics, shows how digital audio can create outcomes and should be in contention for media plans moving forward.
Some final thoughts: You do not always need personalisation in order to drive effective results, but when you do, it greatly improves your brand’s ability to create actionable outcomes through digital audio advertising. Combine this with a first-party, data-led audience targeting strategy and you cannot go wrong.
