Addison Lee worked with Unique Digital to drive consumer bookings across all digital channels. The campaign won the European Search Award for Best Mobile Campaign 2015. Unique Digital tell us more
Brief
In September 2014 Addison Lee hired Unique Digital to help them retain their crown as London’s favourite minicab fleet in an increasingly disrupted digital market. The brief was simple—drive app downloads and consumer bookings across all digital channels and out-of-home media.
Strategy
Unique took a digital-first approach to define Addison Lee’s audience and how they consume media. To increase awareness of the brand’s digital proposition and generate app downloads, a multichannel strategy was developed which included out-of-home, press, SMS, mobile display, search and social.
Brand
Teaming up with our sister agency, Kinetic, we bought digital out-of-home across Socialite Bar digital screens, Roadside 6-sheets and London Digital 6-sheets. This activity gained a large exposure from pedestrian footfall, enabling a broad audience to be reached.
Press activity ran in the Evening Standard and Metro, capturing the key London commuter audience, morning and evening, giving Addison Lee 18 per cent share of voice when run.
Mobile and desktop display supported Addison Lee’s app launch, heavily targeting ABC1 categories, ensuring we day-parted the activity from nine am to five pm to ensure maximum exposure and alignment with press buys.
App
To grow app bookings, Unique broke the strategy into three approaches: download; activate; and retain.
At the heart of our download strategy was using mobile programmatic display on a guaranteed download buy, enabled by using app tracking software Ad-X. This enabled us to grow downloads at significant scale whilst softening out seasonal trends, and reducing risk on Addison Lee’s investment—they only paid for actual, non-incentivised downloads.
The crucial next step was activation. Using data gathered from the download campaigns we set about retargeting users who had download the app but not yet booked with compelling creative across mobile display, Facebook and Twitter.
Retention was managed in conjunction with Addison Lee’s in-house CRM efforts. From a digital perspective, we targeted app users with special promotions across display and social. We also targeted people with the app installed using app extension ads on Google AdWords, deep-linking them straight to the booking page within the app to increase conversion rates with a streamlined user journey.
Web
Our web strategy was simple: hyperlocal coverage of the search landscape in London. Where there was a long-tail search, we were there to direct people to Addison Lee’s responsive site, for a great experience whether booking via a computer, tablet or mobile.
Execution
In such a competitive and comparatively low-margin market, we had to be ruthlessly efficient in order to drive profitable returns. This meant taking advantage of every possible bit of ad and search tech out there, starting with hyperlocal targeting.
Using Addison Lee’s anonymised journey data, we were able to analyse geographic and temporal patterns to determine where and when we should be advertising, and up or down weighting bids. For example, Ikea stores are a regular demand hotspot, so we setup a local geo-fence for intent-specific targeting. In conjunction with Addison Lee, we were also able to test the impact of increased car availability in a specific postcode across one weekend to determine the impact of media on-demand at an exceptionally granular level.
Mobile users were also targeted via SMS. We worked with Weve to drive app installs targeted at ages 21-45 and zone 1 commuters, on both iOS and Android.
From a search perspective we took a two-pronged approach to location targeting. Firstly, our keyword strategy was to cover every possible location-based search within the M25, from Camden to Clapham and SE25 to N19. Secondly, we used Google AdWords’ geographic targeting to target more generic searches in particular locations. Both approaches used location in the ad copy for increased relevance and, as a result, higher click-through rates.
Custom audiences played a key part in our execution. Using anonymised customer data we were able to use look-a-like targeting across display and Facebook. In essence this involves creating a sort of ‘digital footprint’ of Addison Lee’s active customers in order to target other people who demonstrate similar patterns of online behaviour in order to increase the relevance and likely success of our advertising.
Where it gets really clever is in our use of custom trading algorithms. This is where we use third-party data to trigger changes in our advertising behaviour. For example, weather: we automatically increased the scope and aggression of our advertising when the weather was poor. The Transport for London API also enables us to respond to tube delays—for example, if the Northern line is down, we can increase bids in locations affected by the outage.
Across desktop display we utilised Addison Lee’s internal trading desk and used data collected to exclude all users who already had accounts set up.
Result
The campaign generated a significant increase in the number of app downloads (into six-figure downloads and counting) and digital revenue growth of multiple millions. Series testing indicates that all digital activity combined has generated a return-on-advertising-spend of 5.7.
We won the European Search Award for Best Mobile Campaign 2015 for this work.