The key to launching a new product category? Make it personalised. Here, product marketer Katy Berg explains how her team created hyper-relevant YouTube ads to reach young Aussie parents, driving an 11.3% lift in brand awareness and 10.2% lift in consideration for Google Home.
When Google Home debuted in Australia, we were tasked with not only launching a new product but an entirely new product category. Our team had to both raise awareness of this new product and, most importantly, show how Google Home could be helpful and relevant to Aussies in their daily lives.
We wanted to reach people who would benefit most from Google Home’s assistive experiences, so we set our sights on engaging time-crunched young parents—an audience of 2.4M in Australia.1 Looking to demonstrate how Google Home could help them live heads up and hands-free, we set out to reach them where they spend their downtime.
Building relevant, customised creative with Director Mix
To capture Aussie parents’ attention with customised creative, we turned to Director Mix, a product that allowed us to cost-effectively produce more than 100 variations of a single ad while targeting specific audiences on YouTube.
Using YouTube analytics, we identified five popular search categories among our core audience: music, cooking, sports, movies, and entertainment. We were able to break these down even further into 54 YouTube targeting segments, each with a unique video. Using data from YouTube trends, we also picked over 223 keywords and 44 different ad placements, which helped us appear against premium content, like the latest blockbuster movie trailers, top songs or music videos, and how-to tutorials.
Each segment was served a hyper-relevant, personalised ad that featured a question that users might ask of their Google Home. For example, pop fans were shown ads with the command “Ok Google, play my poptastic playlist,” while cricket fans watching videos about the sport were shown ads with the question “What’s a googly?” and cooking enthusiasts watching food tutorials saw “What’s a good substitute for butter?”
By delivering customised bumper ads that directly related to what the user was watching during that exact moment, we were able to showcase how Google Home could be relevant to each individual user.
Driving awareness and interest among Aussie parents
Reflecting the responsive nature of the Google Assistant itself, the contextual ads were a hit, resonating with our target audience and delivering a significant impact on Google Home metrics. Using Brand Lift surveys, we discovered that the campaign drove an 11.3% lift in awareness, a 10.2% lift in consideration, and an 89% increase in related searches among young Aussie parents.
The bumpers also resulted in a lower cost-per-point of brand awareness lift compared with our standard 30-second YouTube ad. Typically, producing so many different ads would be costly and time consuming, but this approach enabled us to spread the word about Google Home quickly and efficiently.
In the end, Director Mix allowed us to tap into our target audience for relevance at scale—all whilst demonstrating the breadth of features available on Google Home by showing multiple use cases for the product. The campaign contributed to Google Home’s huge holiday season in 2017, with the number of Aussies regularly using Google Home and Google Home Mini nearly tripling in the month of December.
“Ok Google, play us some celebratory music!”
