Case Study: Zain's Powerful Customized Ad Campaign

Zain, a leading mobile and data services operator in Saudi, wanted to use the power of digital to push its weekend data offer in an innovative and engaging way. The idea was to target the user depending on the content he or she was consuming on YouTube, building up interest steadily through two sequential teaser videos followed by the offer video.

For example, a user watching a racing video on YouTube would be exposed to an initial bumper video message "Watching racing videos… why not!" As the same user watched further racing content, a second message would appear, "Racing in streets… of course not!" Later, the user would be targeted with the actual offer: "Okay, it seems you're a heavy internet user, subscribe to our weekend offer."

Zain leveraged two new technologies in launching the campaign: Vogon and Google Ads¹ Ad Sequencing. Vogon is a Google tool that allows brands to dynamically embed text, audio or images within their videos to generate unlimited variations. In this way, Zain was able to customize video ad content to target specific audiences. Meanwhile, Google Ads Ad Sequencing enabled the team to promote sequential videos to the same user. According to Zain’s marketing communication team in KSA, “combining Vogon and Ad Sequencing allowed us to dynamically push the right custom message on video to the right customer, at scale, driving high impact in a cost effective manner”.

Zain partnered with Google to identify the top YouTube content trending in Saudi. Based on the research, the target audience was segmented into seven buckets, such as football, cars, music, comedy and so forth. As a next step, Zain came up with engaging messages relevant to each topic. Using Vogon, around 70 videos were generated using a single base video, font and jingle.

Thanks to the power of Google Ads Ad Sequencing, Zain was able to create an interesting video journey for the user. Videos produced in Vogon were mapped to show sequentially across 70 campaigns in Google Ads. Due to the level of the targeting, Mindshare, the media agency partner, was able to optimize the campaigns on a granular and contextual level.

Without the help of Vogon, an implementation involving such a large number of videos would have been inefficient; Zain estimates the cost to manually generate the 70 videos would have come to $140,000, which would have made the campaign impossible from a financial standpoint. However, the inventive approach allowed Zain to reach 2.5 million users at a frequency of five. The brand’s offer was well received by users, with a 50% uplift in brand search queries generated in the first seven days of the campaign’s launch.