When Samsung temporarily shuttered many of its physical stores amid Covid-19 lockdowns in early 2020, the global technology and electronics leader sought out new strategies to create relevant and impactful connections with its consumers in the new environment. The company was preparing to introduce its Galaxy Note20 smartphone across Spain, and to help make the launch a success, Samsung Spain decided to evolve its display advertising strategy.
In order to maximize the impact of its digital marketing efforts, Samsung needed a more efficient way to produce ad creatives that showcased various messages at scale and connected different product offerings with the right audiences. Underpinning this initiative was an overall business objective to increase sales while decreasing cost-per-acquisition (CPA).
Turning to Google Marketing Platform and Ad-Lib.io
Once Samsung had a clear idea of its goals, it began the search for partners to help achieve them. Samsung first turned to Google, as it had previously adopted several Google Marketing Platform products to progress through Boston Consulting Group’s marketing maturity index, a framework that helps companies evolve their digital marketing strategies and grow their businesses.
Samsung also decided to partner with Ad-Lib.io, whose Creative Management Platform uses automation to produce and optimize relevant advertising creative at scale and across digital media channels. Ad-Lib.io’s software can be laid on top of Studio and synchronized with Campaign Manager 360 for ad serving, so the seamless integration between Google Marketing Platform and Ad-Lib.io could help Samsung scale its creative production and reporting within a short timeframe.
With its critical partners in place, Samsung began to execute its strategy across Google Marketing Platform. First, Ad-Lib.io, a certified Google Marketing Platform partner, worked to accelerate and scale Samsung’s creative production in Studio. Then, Samsung connected its Studio account to Campaign Manager 360 and Display & Video 360 to push its creatives into a new media campaign.
Scaling creative production and optimizing delivery
By combining their respective strengths, Samsung and its partners scaled creative production, generating 400 ad variations in fewer than five days. Each ad variant focused on a different product offering and relevant messaging tailored to resonate with more than 300 different audience segments. These segments were built from insights on user behavior collected and organized in Analytics 360, such as users who left abandoned carts or visited a specific Samsung webpage.
To measure the success of its creatives and messaging, Samsung used the Experiments feature in Display & Video 360. This allowed the marketing teams to create mutually exclusive testing groups of users.
Its team also took advantage of creative rotation in Campaign Manager 360 to serve different creatives to the same audience segments, which helped it easily compare performance, optimize campaigns, and gather key learnings for the future.
Increasing return on ad spend
Samsung’s creative strategy did more than just improve its ability to connect the right message with the right audience. It also greatly cut down on launch time, slimming its six-month average down to just five days.
“This campaign and our integration with Google Marketing Platform showed how speed and agility drive performance,” says Adit Abhyankar, Ad-Lib.io’s CEO. “We went from brief to go-live in five days and refreshed creative with 24-hour turnarounds, keeping content fresh and enabling fast learning and optimization to drive huge performance uplift.”
Despite operating in a highly competitive market in the midst of a pandemic, Samsung achieved its online and offline Galaxy Note20 sales objectives. Through accelerating its digital transformation, the team saw a 173% increase in return-on-ad-spend (ROAS) compared to its existing display creatives.
Looking ahead with Google Marketing Platform
Samsung is currently working on expanding its activation of first-party data in Display & Video 360 via Customer Match, onboarding its customer relationship management data to Analytics 360. To make the most of its custom messaging and dynamically delivered creatives, the team is now deploying them throughout the entire marketing funnel.
