Brand Investment During Hard Times
My name is Oleksii Liakh, and I am the founder of the advertising agency 'newage' in Kyiv, Ukraine. Our agency has persevered throughout 2022 and continues to run campaigns for clients in 2023. During this time, each of us has gained more experience than in the preceding decade, as we have all learned to work under extraordinary circumstances that have become a part of everyday life in Ukraine. In this column, I want to share insights that our clients have taught me - a testament to the fact that media advertising is indeed an investment. Let's explore a few success stories of how prominent Ukrainian brands invest in advertising and reap the rewards.
Story 1 — MAUDAU
MAUDAU is a major Ukrainian online retailer offering a wide range of products, including food, baby goods, alcohol, pet supplies, and small electronics. Until February 24th, few in Ukraine were aware of this store because it entered the market in the summer of 2021, and substantial brand campaigns only began after russia's full-scale invasion.
Within a year, MAUDAU climbed to the top five in terms of website traffic and sales in the Ukrainian e-commerce sector. This achievement was driven by highly active campaigns with clear positioning. MAUDAU saw a 29% increase in brand lift for alcohol and a 32% increase for baby products. While the audience for these categories might seem unrelated, the results were truly remarkable. Let's delve into how they achieved this success.
MAUDAU utilised various promotional channels, from traditional media to personalized digital advertising, with the latter being where we assisted. Brand lift is a crucial metric for many advertisers, but at newage, we have more technologically advanced tools for measuring effectiveness. Digital is traceable, allowing us to follow the consumer's journey from ad exposure to payment page, even if they didn't directly click on the ad. We can track post-view and cross-device conversions. These data points are available in Campaign Manager 360, a tool we work with, and they help us measure the impact of MAUDAU's advertising investment.
We used a Comprehensive Analysis of Display Advertising approach to evaluate the impact of MAUDAU's advertising. The results were astonishing: those who saw the ads converted at much higher rates compared to those who visited the website "randomly" without exposure to ads (or who were influenced by offline channels).
As we all know, viewers are more likely to click on a familiar brand than an unfamiliar one. Media campaigns increase CTR (Click-Through Rate) for your search campaigns, thereby reducing their costs. As shown in the previous slide, people who saw the ads converted better. According to the client's data, the cost-per-click was halved, allowing them to get more clicks for the same budget. You can see the growth in conversion rates on the slide as well.
With this approach, you can analyze data in more detail and see how advertising impacts specific traffic sources. We understand that launching media advertising influences other traffic sources, but for this particular client, brand traffic has been increasing exponentially month after month.
Furthermore, media campaigns had a positive influence on brand-related search queries, benefiting both paid and organic search. Paid search costs decreased month after month while delivering increasing traffic for the same budget. This demonstrates that media campaigns not only increase brand awareness but also enhance the performance of other traffic channels on the website.
Therefore, media enhances and improves the performance of other traffic channels on the website. Besides brand awareness, you can also see the effectiveness results in other channels, which is extremely important.
Story 2 — OLX
OLX is an international brand and a major advertiser. In Ukraine, this website consistently ranks among the top ten in terms of traffic, not even considering app traffic. It is a classifieds platform for private users and businesses; people buy and sell goods, post job vacancies and resumes, and help homeless animals, among other things.
This project proved to be very beneficial in times of crisis, as a volunteer section opened on the platform, where people offered and sought help. They also sell cars suitable for use by the Armed Forces of Ukraine, which is important for our society. Therefore, projects like OLX, which bring people together, often thrive during crisis periods, so I am not surprised by the client's activity during wartime.
We resumed work with the client in 2023, so the cases are from 2023, although the client was active throughout 2022. Like the previous client, OLX targets specific categories. Below is a "technometric" brand lift that we calculate manually by comparing the media audience to those who have not seen the advertising. The client uses GA360, making it easier to obtain more interesting data.
For example, on this slide, we see negative values, which could be interpreted as if the media advertising did not work (or even harmed), but this would be a misinterpretation of the data. It's important to set the right KPIs. The advertiser had six thematic campaigns over three months. Two of them showed negative conversion lift because their goal was to attract new clients. When it comes to attracting new clients, you increase the quantity but not necessarily the conversion rate. The conversion rate percentage does not increase, which is normal because there is an increase in the overall interested audience before this conversion.
However, if we look at the main KPI of the campaign, user acquisition, all categories where the ad campaigns were run have grown. In contrast, categories we did not promote have seen a drop in visitation. This decline may not only be due to the absence of ad campaigns but also due to seasonality and other external factors, which we simply acknowledge here. The same conversion brand lift allows us to calculate how many new users we have attracted.
The main idea of this section is that even brands like OLX, which have the highest top-of-mind awareness in Ukraine and are used by everyone from time to time, run media advertising campaigns, whether thematic or local, to strengthen their positions precisely. Many people believe that media advertising is only about big campaigns with the most expensive creative and tens of millions of views, but the OLX example shows that local, thematic, correctly targeted, and not overpriced campaigns yield results.
Story 3 — YES
I want to share a short story rather than a case, perhaps. One of the first Ukrainian advertisers who returned to us and started planning a media campaign seriously is the brand of school backpacks YES. The season in this niche is July-August, so the client began planning the advertising campaign in May 2022.
"Oleksii, war is war, but children need to go to school anyway!" — said the advertiser.
And this is truly inspiring that a company from Dnipro, with production and investments 100 kilometers away from the front line, understands that their investment in the brand is important, and it's a lesser risk than losing market share by not advertising at all.
Of course, we conducted a campaign for YES.
Conclusion
Many still believe that performance advertising and brand advertising are opposing things, and each of them takes resources from the other, pulling the blanket to itself. But that's not the case. These two tools complement each other, and the task of marketers is to effectively allocate resources between promotion methods. And to do this, you need to correctly analyze campaigns, collect the right data, and draw accurate conclusions.
Performance advertising meets existing demand, media formats create it, and media campaigns don't necessarily have to be large or national campaigns. They can be narrow in scope with small budgets.
How to allocate advertising tools
During the war in Ukraine, the conditions of life and work have changed significantly, and accordingly, approaches to ad placement and planning have changed. It's not certain that these approaches will work the same way in peaceful countries with stable electricity and generally more predictable conditions than here. But I'll list the approaches that have proven to be the most effective and sustainable for us.
Reserves - use reserves, and placements with fixed prices. This was especially useful during blackouts. After disruptions in the power infrastructure, there were blackouts that no one could predict, traffic decreased, and therefore competition for ad impressions increased. However, we had reserves and were sure that Google would show ads to the number of people it committed to, and it happened. We secured a significant share of voice.
Show scenarios. They work, and gain great frequency, which is cool for introducing a new brand or product to the market (or for launching a brand/product into a new market).
SmartTV has grown significantly and provides high-quality contact. This advertising is slightly more expensive than other placements, but its users watch on a large screen and skip less often, making it ideal for media.
Video (including non-skip) - use it when needed, don't be afraid. Yes, it's more expensive, but it can be justified when you need the client to remember the creative.
Blacklist and whitelist - monitor where your ads are shown, as it's your reputation. And don't sponsor Russia, just don't.
Audio advertising - don't place it on music channels on YouTube and in music apps (e.g., Spotify) as regular video ads. Adapt the ad to be listened to only, and emphasize the main points. This helps to add frequencies and coverage. They listen to it attentively, and it's cheaper.
Now it's more challenging to plan. The task for specialists and agencies is to use tools that collect data well. Digital can be very adaptive. In the current realities, with shelling, news, and blackouts, only adaptation will help us.
Entrepreneurs in Ukraine are a great force
I am proud of Ukrainian businessmen and Ukrainian companies. Businesses provide jobs and the opportunity for people to earn a living, they pay taxes, and most importantly, they give hope. I can't even imagine what it looks like when there is no advertising, and businesses are closing branch after branch.
So, the first thing the state relies on, okay, the second after the people, is businessmen.
If you have the opportunity to collaborate with Ukrainian businesses, take advantage of it because Ukrainian companies are working as effectively as ever now. Import products from Ukrainian farms and factories, hire a Ukrainian subcontractor under a White Paper, invite a Ukrainian speaker to your conference, and you will get the best product/service.
