Case Study

Brief

Daihatsu, the Japanese vehicle manufacturer, wanted to raise brand awareness of their market leading small car – the ‘Cuore’ – and as a secondary objective, the ‘Daihatsu’ brand in the German marketplace through online advertising. 

Strategy

Daihatsu appointed leading German publisher, freeXmedia, to launch a brand building online ad campaign across their wide range of popular online media.

freeXmedia called on the pioneers in predictive behavioural targeting, nugg.ad to drive brand awareness of Daihatsu and their Cuore vehicle range.

nugg.ad was brought on board to identify which consumers on freeXmedia’s broad range of online media do and don’t have affinity with the Daihatsu and Cuore brands, then model and target them with the appropriate brand building creative. This activity was undertaken through nugg.ad’s ‘branding optimiser’ tool.

For the first time this product measures the emotional effect of online advertising on consumers, making ‘click-in-the-head’ measurable.

It is able to identify and catagorise consumers’ brand affinity through collating data from special online user surveys and internet surfing patterns. Branding campaigns are then tailored to attract users with strong affinity for retention purposes, or little affinity for acquisition purposes. Overall, it brings maximum efficiency to branding campaigns.

Execution

The first phase of the four week campaign saw banner and skyscraper ads delivered without targeting across freeXmedia’s websites. Those who were exposed to the campaign were then targeted - using the ‘branding optimiser’ product - with online surveys asking if they were familiar with Daihatsu and whether they had ever heard of the Cuore model.

For the second phase the ‘branding optimiser’ was used to serve wallpaper ads exclusively at users who were classified as being favourably inclined towards the brand, based on their responses from the first phase.

Results

By using nugg.ad’s ‘branding optimiser’ tool brand awareness for the Daihatsu Cuore grew by a considerable 18 per cent, when compared with the control group in the first phase, where no targeting was used.

There was also a marked improvement on overall brand awareness for ’Daihatsu’, which increased by five per cent.

Lars Woltermann, Head of Marketing at Daihatsu, said: “The effect of the nugg.ad ‘branding optimiser’ has certainly convinced us; the 18 per cent increase in awareness for the Cuore was more than enough to meet our expectations. We were also very happy with the 5 per cent increase in our overall brand awareness.”