The Campaign

When you search the words children, grow up, fast and sad in English, Google returns over 7 million results; in Japanese, about 680,000 results. Mothers are naturally happy to see their children grow, but they are sad when they realize this period of cuteness will be gone in a flash. Delivering ads that shows a child growing up quickly, we express the speed of that growth and suggest a way to alleviate their sadness--Photobook which allows them to preserve the precious period in albums that they can treasure forever.With child-rearing mothers as our target, we wanted to connect the idea that children grow up quickly with the notion that preserving a record of their children's growth through Photobook is desirable.

Creative Execution

We created video ads (HTML5) featuring a 0-, 2-, and 5-year old boy, each with similar features. These ads would be delivered in sequence to each user based on a cookie value to convey the sense that the boy was growing up. To connect with as many users as possible, we would use an ad network (Google Display Network), which boasts a wider reach than video-sharing sites such as YouTube. For data gathering, we would count clicks and quantify the effect of ad viewing (using DoubleClick Campaign Manager's attribute measurement function). We launched the Growing Boy ad campaign in the Japanese market in November 2015. Delivery of the ads was done by uploading them to a third-party server (DoubleClick Campaign Manager) and adding a third-party tag. Since the key point of the ads was to show a boy growing up, we changed the ad to show an older boy after a certain number of impressions had been made with the user's advertising frame.

Compared with before, we were able to increase the number of sessions from new users on the Photobook website by 32% and reduce the cost of a conversion (such as a photobook order, special app download or shop search) to about 1/3 the cost of previous static-image banners.

It is relevant because through the combined use of ad technology and creative design, we were able to win new customers among the ad targets by revealing their common concerns and latent needs.