SAN SEBASTIAN: Boost, a children’s health drink popular in India, has successfully targeted the under-12 age group via mobile, despite the fact that most of the target audience do not own their own handset.
The campaign, which was a finalist in the recent I-COM Data Creativity Awards, marked a sharp departure from 30 years of reliance on TV advertising, according to MA Parthasarathy, chief product officer of Boost’s agency, Mindshare.
“In the past couple of years there’s been cataclysmic shift in the Indian media scenario,” he explained, “with a huge move away from television and into digital media, with mobile especially prominent.
“This was leading to a drop in the engagement level of kids with the brand Boost.” (For more details, read WARC’s report: How Boost targets children on parent’s phones.)
The first part of the brand’s response was to do something other than television, creating three long-form digital video content pieces featuring the captain of the Indian cricket team, Virat Kohli, in a continuation of a long-running marketing approach of using sports people to promote the product.
The second was to take this content to where children were spending time they previously spent with television, which Boost identified as mobile gaming.
“We then knew what context was relevant, but it still didn’t solve the problem of accessing them,” noted Parthsarathy, “because eight to 12-year-old kids play games on phones which they don’t own. It could be their parents’ phone or phones of elder siblings.
“What complicates this even further is that these parents and older siblings also play the same games on the same phones,” he added.
A multi-stage process involving layers of analytics and smart data established consumption patterns around gaming and time of day and overlaid these with other behaviour such as the use of non-child apps; device IDs were also mapped to other third-party data platforms to be as sure as possible that the videos were being served to the relevant audience.
“The objective was to reach out to kids, and we managed to reach out to 60% of the entire universe of eight to 12-year-old kids during this campaign,” Parthasarathy reported, adding that “the view-through rate was particularly impressive”.
The campaign, which was a finalist in the recent I-COM Data Creativity Awards, marked a sharp departure from 30 years of reliance on TV advertising, according to MA Parthasarathy, chief product officer of Boost’s agency, Mindshare.
“In the past couple of years there’s been cataclysmic shift in the Indian media scenario,” he explained, “with a huge move away from television and into digital media, with mobile especially prominent.
“This was leading to a drop in the engagement level of kids with the brand Boost.” (For more details, read WARC’s report: How Boost targets children on parent’s phones.)
The first part of the brand’s response was to do something other than television, creating three long-form digital video content pieces featuring the captain of the Indian cricket team, Virat Kohli, in a continuation of a long-running marketing approach of using sports people to promote the product.
The second was to take this content to where children were spending time they previously spent with television, which Boost identified as mobile gaming.
“We then knew what context was relevant, but it still didn’t solve the problem of accessing them,” noted Parthsarathy, “because eight to 12-year-old kids play games on phones which they don’t own. It could be their parents’ phone or phones of elder siblings.
“What complicates this even further is that these parents and older siblings also play the same games on the same phones,” he added.
A multi-stage process involving layers of analytics and smart data established consumption patterns around gaming and time of day and overlaid these with other behaviour such as the use of non-child apps; device IDs were also mapped to other third-party data platforms to be as sure as possible that the videos were being served to the relevant audience.
“The objective was to reach out to kids, and we managed to reach out to 60% of the entire universe of eight to 12-year-old kids during this campaign,” Parthasarathy reported, adding that “the view-through rate was particularly impressive”.
Sourced from WARC
