Universal Pictures makes movie ads relevant with DoubleClick

Universal Pictures France wanted to focus on audience planning rather than media planning, so they partnered with KR Media on a programmatic buying approach built around DoubleClick Bid Manager to achieve their ambition.

Universal Pictures France needed to efficiently promote new releases of movies like The Huntsman, Warcraft, Jason Bourne and The Secret Life of Pets. While branding focused on views-reach-viewability was the primary goal, they also wanted to incorporate some performance elements, such as remarketing to drive interested users to pre-book tickets online.

Data helps deliver the best audience 

In order to focus on the entire user journey, the team’s first step was to tag the YouTube environment of each film to collect data. This would allow them to remarket to this audience programmatically. 

To reach audiences on relevant sites in the two weeks prior to the release of each movie, Universal Pictures France partnered with several leading online video publishers to secure suitable inventory through Programmatic Guaranteed. Universal Pictures France could even incorporate the publishers’ third-party data directly into DoubleClick Bid Manager.

In the two weeks leading up to the release of each movie, the team initiated an open auction strategy on video using Custom Affinities in DoubleClick Bid Manager. Depending on the movie content, multiple sources of Google data could be layered to create exceptional targeting opportunities. For example, for the release of Ride Along 2, Universal Pictures France could target not just cinema lovers, but also people interested in hip-hop. Similarly, they could also target video gamers for the release of Warcraft.

To reach audiences during the week of each film’s release, the team turned to Google Preferred, which aggregates YouTube's top content into easy-to-buy packages organized around categories of content. This meant an ad for The Secret Life of Pets, for example, would appear next to YouTube content popular among the audience likely to be interested in that particular film.

Throughout the campaigns, Universal Pictures France ran data-driven creatives, tailoring ads to key audience segments. For example, they used Custom Affinities to present a dedicated creative highlighting the best action sequences in The Huntsman to an audience segment made up of fans of the film as well as action movies. Meanwhile, a more generic creative was served to fans of fantasy movies via topic targeting on YouTube. 

The final step was to reach viewers who had engaged with a film’s advertising with remarketing messages encouraging them to go to cinemas and eventually pre-book click-to-collect cinema tickets. This meant that in the days leading up to the film’s general release, audiences would see a YouTube Masthead, TrueView ad or video ad reminding them to make a plan to watch the film.

Outstanding results through smarter buying 

Using previous approaches, Universal Pictures France campaigns achieved an average view-through rate of 60% and with a frequency of four impressions exceeding the goal of two to three impressions. In terms of reach, the goals were to secure maximum viewability in cross device environment, to obtain a better completion rate and to reduce the CPM.

Using a holistic media buying approach enabled the brand to meet and exceed all goals. For example, the integrated World of Warcraft campaign delivered: 

• average view-through rate of 74% 
  
• average frequency of 2.8
  
• average viewability of 87% 
  
• CPM that was 20% below the benchmark

Going forward, Universal Pictures France is committed to introducing further type of data and marketing innovation across the user journey, with native and custom lightbox ads set to feature in upcoming campaigns for the brand’s latest cinema releases. Last but not least the cross-device capabilities of DoubleClick Bid Manager to follow user paths will deploy later in 2017.

*Results from campaign for The Secret Life of Pets