The Campaign

IT decision makers trawl through an extensive amount of online information every day. This makes it very difficult for a brand like Intel to make sense of what IT decision makers have looked at online, and be able to serve the right kind of ads at the right time. So, we asked ourselves, when faced with online information overload when browsing, how do we remember what is valuable to us? Bookmarks! People use bookmarks all the time to mark what they want to remember online. Could this behavior somehow translate to solve a business problem? Introducing: Intel’s Undercover Bookmarks.

Creative Execution

Our bookmarking system was smart; self-learning all the time. Leveraging advanced technology, our system updated targets’ insights with every ad viewed, and informed customized ad content with every new click. If a target clicked on an ad about cloud computing, no matter which domain they went to next, the following Intel ad displayed to them had content relevant to cloud computing. If they clicked on a different IT product/ topic later, our system updated to this new preference automatically and served updated personalized content. We used Google’s rich media to dynamically deliver different content to each user and floodlight-id technology to identify individual users across domains. It is no longer necessary to wait until after a campaign to optimize. In this campaign, we continually updated and optimized by using real-time insights. Our solution could navigate across different domains, regardless of different data systems - a first for Intel China!

We successfully targeted 20% more IT decision makers than last year with our personalized dynamic content! Even better, the engagement rates improved massively, with repeat rate increase of 15.4% showing that IT decision makers responded more positively to this new targeting method, and CPC decreased by 12%. Most importantly, targets that landed on Intel.com were 35% more engaged than before our campaign! (Source: Intel’s internal Preference Engagement Rate)

Our innovative ad solution aimed to use Intel’s ads as “undercover” bookmarks - tools to bank insights on Intel’s targets’ real-time online preferences. We created Intel’s own bookmarking system, allowing us to bookmark targets' content interest based on the last content they read. Gaining these data insights, we created customized Intel ads that spoke directly to the mindsets and last point of interest of Intel’s targets. Our bookmarks looked like regular Intel ads, but they were our windows into Intel’s targets’ online journeys. We captured targets landing on IT portal site homepages, and used tags to divide them into 2 groups: consumer-related and business-related. As they moved to sub-pages, we got more specific. We delivered rich media creatives featuring different topic tabs, each with 3-4 different articles to click and read. From homepages to sub-pages, we bookmarked insights that gave Intel the ability to develop the most effective follow-up actions.