Ford New Zealand Drives Efficiency and Performance with AI-Powered audience persona
Ford New Zealand, with its legacy of vehicles like the Falcon and the Kiwi-engineered T6 Ranger, continues to create diverse, innovative, and quality cars, while staying true to its commitment to quality.
Despite their established success, Ford New Zealand found themselves facing a challenging start to 2024. With the removal of the Clean Car Discount (CCD) Fees, a program that incentivized the purchase of fuel-efficient vehicles, the electric vehicle market saw a sharp decline, affecting EV Hybrid models This, coupled with a weakening economy impacting commercial sales, created a tough environment for car dealers like Ford.
In response to these challenges, Ford sought to maximize the impact of its marketing efforts, particularly for its models Ford Ranger and Ford Escape Hybrid models. Their goal was to efficiently connect with relevant audiences across New Zealand's diverse market segments while strategically allocating their budget to maintain market share amidst these economic headwinds.
Ford’s media agency GroupM Nexus worked with their Google team to develop a robust audience strategy, ensuring they were showing their ads to the most relevant audiences. They wanted to balance focused audience reach with broad reach, sustaining sales momentum across key vehicle categories. In order to do this, they implemented audience persona, an AI-powered audience feature within Display & Video 360, across Ford New Zealand’s programmatic omnichannel campaigns, including display, online video and YouTube. With audience persona, they were able to identify and reach niche and highly-relevant audience segments that they had never targeted before.
Audience persona uses Google AI to seamlessly translate audience personas into ready-to-activate segments for programmatic campaigns. With this feature, GroupM was able to simply describe their ideal customer, and the tool instantly generated a combination of relevant audience segments from over a thousand of available options. This simplified the selection of existing audiences, while also identifying new, high-potential audiences for expanded reach and improved results.
GroupM and Ford New Zealand’s use of audience persona led to a 17.3% improvement in video completion rates. Not only did they see performance improvements, but this also led to a 4.6% reduction in time spent per programmatic trader per week, freeing up time for other optimization efforts.
Hinging on the success they achieved in this tentpole campaign, Ford and GroupM are eager to explore and implement audience persona across other campaigns to further enhance their marketing efficiency and effectiveness, and continue to free up time for other marketing efforts.
