The Campaign

To understand how each person in our database used their mobile phone, we engaged Google as our strategic partner. Google was the technical powerhouse which tapped dtac’s rich CRM database and identified usage patterns, so that we could serve ads with only the most relevant messaging for each individual, based on their need state at that moment in time. Through this dynamic profiling process, we found individuals with the highest propensity to convert or upgrade, from our already robust database.

Creative Execution

We had a huge list of segmented consumers, our challenge was to identify them online. In order to do that, we used cookies, which had earlier been dropped when a user visited dtac’s website. Each cookie acted as a unique identifier that this particular phone belonged to a particular person. With the use of DoubleClick technology and programmatic targeting, we then matched cookies with encrypted CRM IDs. So when that user browsed online later on, we showed user-targeted promotions based on real-time integrations of the systems. We deployed over a hundred different creative visuals, providing hyper-relevant messaging with an instant call to action. For instance, if a user was about to hit their data package limit, we would serve them a data top-up ad. If a user was identified as a heavy phone user, the system would show them an upgraded voice package. All this in real time

Within one month, 1,000,000 mobile ad impressions were served to dtac users; 4,000 banner clicks were generated. dtac’s average conversion rate was 0.5%; but this campaign returned as much as 5%. This Asia-first idea delivered 10 times higher conversions in online transactions than any other performance campaign ever run by dtac, which was already the market leader in Thailand.

it shows how today digital media can identify the right person for the brand/product to gain incremental sales. Thailand had a saturated mobile marketplace, and the only way a telco could grow its business was to upsell services to current users. So we found an innovative way to trigger an upgrade —at the moment the user needed it most, and in real time. As a result, our programmatic campaign achieved a campaign ROI over 10 times higher than any conversion campaign the client has ever run. This has set a new standard for future data-driven campaigns.

Insights, Strategy and the Idea

Consumer privacy was a key concern, so our strategy worked around those parameters by encrypting customer data such as mobile phone numbers, times of heavy usage, and duration of heavy data usage. From a media perspective, we knew a high percentage of banners were wasted advertising dollars, simply because the banner was not relevant to a viewer. Our planned banners were tactical, which was even more challenging, since consumers would automatically reject a “hard-sell” banner. The only way around it was to ensure the offer within the banner was hyper-relevant to the user at the specific moment in time with an immediate benefit, like more talk time just when you were running out. Together with dtac and Google, we crafted an APAC-first solution to make our vision a reality. The real-time technology we used encrypted millions of mobile numbers and usage data—based on dtac’s database—into coded CRM IDs.