The Campaign

CNN created an immersive and engaging online experience “A Bolt of Blue” which profiled unique insights from Usain Bolt, an example of someone who has striven to pursue excellence - no matter what. The online feature championed his unyielding passion and perseverance to become the total master of what he does as he looks to the summer games and his legacy. It is this spirit and attitude to achieve excellence that is synonymous with ANA and its five star services.

Creative Execution

Throughout the 6-week campaign (13th July- 24th July) we extensively monitored our traffic delivery and audience quality across the CNN site each week (often times daily). We focused particularly on our promotional ad placements and optimized accordingly to ensure that all placements were served in the best performing parts of the site, whilst also closely monitoring the Krux and Quantcast data collection to help make decisions that would increase our traction with and engagement with the target audience. Supporting this effort, we worked closely with Rubicon to ensure that we targeted the same audiences programmatically, off platform. We implemented A/B promotional headline testing across our in feed native placement, social media and our content recommendation platforms. In total we created 48 different headline variations for the feature over the 6-week campaign. All these efforts ensured that optimized the user experiences and engagement with the target audience.

The feature delivered record-breaking results for a 6-week campaign at CNN International: • 14.15% CTR – the highest video CTR for a campaign at CNN • 304,864 page views for the A Bolt of Blue • 262,369 unique users accessing the A Bolt of Blue • 3,598 Facebook Likes, 452 Shares and 239 comments • Average time spent on the single page site per visit: 2 minutes 34 seconds • Impact: 304%+ performance against page view KPI • Quantcast and Krux data proved that we delivered against the target audiences: Male, 35-54, salary of $100K+ and business elite C-suites. • Increased awareness of the ANA brand and increased visits to their online booking site.

We want to nominate the ANA campaign as a glowing example of a holistic and integrated advertising strategy which comprised of a robust and dedicated engagement strategy that utilised first and third party data, programmatic, custom made in-feed native placements, social media and content amplification. The scheme of this campaign was designed to engage the target audience of ANA across multiple platforms and devices. Content was not only delivered within the CNN environment, but also placed across social media, search, content recommendation platforms and programmatic.

Insights, Strategy and the Idea

As a starting point, we used our own first party data across CNN and third party data provided by Krux, to create relevant audience segments: 1. Sports Enthusiasts (given the Usain Bolt association) 2. Business Traveller/Business leaders/C Suites executive We then served relevant promotional ad placements against these audience segments to drive traffic to the feature page. We utilised a programme called Quantcast that monitored and collected data on each audience member viewing and engaging with the ads themselves. This data helped enhance our audience targeting strategy and helped us optimize the campaign further by retargeting lookalike audiences which increased our reach and maximized our chances of engagement to the feature page. We also placed a Krux audience-tracking pixel on the feature page that helped enhance and strengthen our audience segment data allowing greater opportunity for retargeting and serving creative to lookalike audiences