In this second part of our four-part 2022 mega sale season guide, we show you how your creative campaigns can stand out. Explore the rest of the guide to uncover the latest shopper trends, tips for creating seamless shopping experiences, and how-tos for effective media planning.
Mega sale days are a busy time for shoppers. They’re on the hunt for the best deals and frequently come across various ads. To capture their attention in these critical sale moments, brands need ad creative that stand out, inspire confidence, and speak to shoppers.
Here are four tried-and-tested ways brands in APAC have come up with ad creative that win shoppers’ attention and drive purchases during key sale moments.
1. Tell a compelling story with video and audio that resonate
It’s no secret that attention-grabbing video creative which tells a compelling story will help your brand cut through the noise. The magic lies in knowing how to bring eye-catching visuals and earworms together to take a relatable campaign story, based on strong consumer insights, to the next level.
Lazada, a leading e-commerce platform in Southeast Asia (SEA), which garnered over 35 million video views in the Philippines with its ad creative Nasa Lazada Yan (“That’s in Lazada” in Tagalog) shows how this can be done by tapping into what people care about, listen, and watch.
The story Lazada wanted to tell: no matter what shoppers need, they can find it on Lazada, which stocks a mind-boggling array of items. To start, the brand used consented first-party data to analyze over 90 million items and services on its platform. In the process, it uncovered everything unique about its offerings, from the most-searched items to the bestselling ones and even items and services that people assumed couldn’t be bought on Lazada.
It then turned this incredible list of items into catchy lyrics and set them to a melody that was inspired by the most-played anthems and trending songs in the Philippines. The singers for the music video, YouTube creator Mimiyuuuh and music group SB19, were selected because of their popularity on Search and social media.
Not only was the video ad creative a crowd-pleaser — its title became a popular slang in the Philippines — it also resonated widely with shoppers and Lazada saw growth in the number of buyers who regularly purchase from its platform.
2. Use a creative universe to achieve depth and breadth across various ad formats
To be present wherever shoppers are and to meet their varied needs with a multitude of fresh yet recognizable creative, brands are taking a leaf from the success of fictional and cinematic universes and coming up with creative universes.
A creative universe provides brands with an overarching creative story that can be mined for depth, with different subplots conveying different marketing objectives. Variations of the ad creative are used to tell these related stories, enabling brands to maintain a unified creative identity across the breadth of ads, marketing objectives, and platforms.
Having a creative universe also means a brand’s related ads are well-suited to attracting consumers’ attention because the ads are both familiar and fresh each time. Another benefit: using variations of the creative means brands can fully maximize their ad assets and be more efficient in creative production.
For example, leading SEA super app Grab created a humorous space-themed creative universe for its Ramadan mega sale last year. It had a spaceship named Bisalah, after an Indonesian catchphrase for overcoming difficulties with cheer, and it featured top Indonesian celebrities as the ship’s crew members.
In the creative universe, the space crew turns to Grab for all its “bisalah” moments, showing how there is no pressing consumer need that people can’t be delivered from with the help of the super app. Indeed, the overarching creative story enabled Grab to develop multiple subplots that showcase, cohesively, its range of product verticals and ability to provide for any consumer need. The result: its brand awareness increased, achieving a 4.5% higher ad recall.
Once you’ve developed your creative universe, you can turn to automation marketing solutions such as Performance Max, powered by machine learning, to uncover the best creative combinations for your campaign and surface them to the most relevant audiences across all of Google’s advertising channels.
3. Collaborate with trusted online video creators
Online video creators are experts when it comes to engaging audiences and building trust through relationships. Their dedicated community of followers turn to them and their user reviews for advice throughout the shopping journey. In fact, 88% of APAC YouTube viewers agree that YouTube creators give them recommendations they can trust.1
A sponsored video, for example, enables a brand’s product to be endorsed naturally by a creator in the video, making for a more relevant and engaging ad experience for viewers who are already attuned to the creator’s content. That’s why Unilever Simple Vietnam collaborated with Chau Bui, a popular Vietnamese YouTube creator, on a video about skin care tips for its 11.11 sale.
The creator featured the brand's new product line in her beauty tutorial, and the online video directed traffic to the brand’s Shopee page. Through the collaboration, Unilever Simple reached 7.4 million unique users and achieved a 110% lift in return on ad spend.
4. Highlight benefits and use a persuasive call-to-action
On mega sale days, people are looking for a convincing reason to make that final decision to click “buy.” So while it might seem obvious, highlighting how your product benefits consumers and guiding them to purchase with a clear call-to-action (CTA) can get them off the fence and help you win sales.
Pointing out what people stand to gain by making a purchase should be part of your CTA. Leclerc says, “Brands can guide shoppers to the next step by providing a unique experience, value, or reward for their behavior. Rewards are not only financial, they can be social or emotional.”
For example, Thailand’s Central Retail department store made sure the video creative for its 12.12 mega sale promotions on its app highlighted, in the first 5 seconds, the unbeatable offers people stand to gain: high discount rates, low prices, and a buy-one-get-one promotion. The video also used a persuasive CTA, “Download the app and shop now,” to drive people to its app to shop.
By making these four creative best practices part of your brand’s mega sale creative strategy, you’ll be well-positioned to come up with a creative that captures people’s attention during this busy sale season and positively impacts your bottom line. To take your mega sale campaign to the next level, learn how you can make the most of the latest shopper trends, provide a seamless shopping experience, and launch a strong media strategy in the other three parts of our mega sale guide.
Contributors: Rachael Powell, APAC Consumer and Market Insights Lead; Pei Ling Ho, Global Creative Director — Creative Works
