Uber Eats delivers a 10% increase in campaign reach with Display & Video 360
The food delivery industry had massive growth the past year as more people ordered from home. To set themselves apart from the competition, Uber Eats launched their new “Tonight I’ll be eating” campaign to build their brand with celebrities and key cultural moments. For example, sponsoring the football season in the US. In doing so, they shifted their digital marketing strategy to not only focus on customer acquisition but also drive brand awareness. To effectively reach people where they are, Uber Eats decided to supplement their TV strategy with video ads on laptops, mobile and connected TV.
Massive reach through Programmatic Guaranteed
When assessing this challenge, Uber and their media team at MediaCom found that using Display & Video 360 would give them access to the largest and most diverse pool of inventory sources – from display and video to audio and connected TV (CTV). Because inventory is hard to come by and expensive around high-visibility events such as football games, the Uber Eats team used Programmatic Guaranteed in Display & Video 360 to secure in-demand deals. They harnessed an inventory package curated by their Google account management team to reach their audience across YouTube, Spotify, Hulu, ESPN, Roku and more. Securing relevant inventory early via Programmatic Guaranteed helped Uber pace out deals and better control budgets. Combining this variety of channels in one platform helped Uber reach over 76 million users, among which 25% were CTV users, a growing audience.
Effective cross-channel frequency management
Not only did the Uber Eats team know that ad saturation could be detrimental to their brand, they also knew it could negatively impact campaign performance. So Uber Eats turned to Ads Data Hub to run customized analysis and understand which ad frequency drove the best campaign results. They uncovered that after 7 weekly ad exposures, effectiveness went down. With these insights in mind and all inventory sources and formats in one place, Uber Eats could effectively manage and control ad exposure. YouTube is fundamental to how Uber Eats reaches the 18-35 demographics which are lighter TV viewers so using a tool that could manage frequency across that inventory and their other buys was critical.
Uber Eats set a cross-channel frequency goal and skipped bids exceeding the ideal ad exposure. Uber Eats particularly valued how frequency management works for Programmatic Guaranteed deals. Once their overall campaign frequency goal was reached, Display & Video 360 aimed at stopping showing more ads from the Programmatic Guaranteed deals while still prioritizing and ensuring that the agreed number of impressions was delivered.
As a result, Uber Eats was able to reach 10% more people than they would have without a unified approach. By passing on unnecessary impressions, Uber also limited budget waste. In fact, they saved and reinvested the equivalent of 150% of their platform fees.
Looking Ahead
In the future, Uber Eats will keep using Display & Video 360 as their preferred demand side platform partner. After seeing success with CTV they expect this channel to take on some of the heavy lifting that linear TV was previously doing.
