The Campaign

We wanted to craft beautiful, colourful creatives that would prove attractive to potential beauty buyers and deliver powerful brand experiences, while making an instant impact with on-the-go mobile audiences. Hence, we created a series of six visually stunning, playful mobile ads designed to include mini-games, inspired by the “Play For Peace” Christmas collection. The sensory, interactive mobile ads combined engaging and playful content, with a platform to discover The Body Shop’s “Play for Peace” collection. Based on “Kidulting” or the concept of embracing the inner child in adults, the playable mobile ads aimed to reposition The Body Shop as a youthful, playful brand. Creatives were responsive to touch and movement, and used the device full function, allowing for a wide range of meaningful interactions. The playable ads ran on smartphones, with games including claw machine and truth-or-dare wheel. Audiences were rewarded for completing the mini-games with discount vouchers.

Creative Execution

Six versions of The Body Shop ad units ran on smartphones from 3 November 2017 to 25 December 2017, in the following sequence: 3 November: For Him, For Her Advent Calendar 15 November: Duck n’ Dive 20 November: Truth or Dare 7 December: Christmas Goodies 11 December: 12 Days Christmas Treats All creatives were full-screen mobile banners that were built with our proprietary technology and layered on top of HTML5. High-resolution and lightweight, these formats are fully responsive to touch and movement, and load faster than standard rich media formats. This resulted in high impact ad formats that helped The Body Shop provide the best user experience, and deliver intuitive and crisp content to younger, time-poor mobile audiences. The playable ads were delivered programmatically to young, mobile audiences via a combination of: >Traditional parameters: e.g. location and demographics >Smart targeting of behaviour and interest trends: e.g. an interest in beauty and skincare products for self-pampering and gifting purposes, and a combined preference for shopping online and in brick-and-mortar stores The ad unit placements were on mobile web and in-app inventory across relevant site verticals such as lifestyle and beauty, along with more generic ones, including news and travel.

The combination of a made-for-mobile engagement model and high-impact visuals delivered outstanding media performance: Over one million impressions (1,242,682 exactly) led to 266,429 genuine brand engagements, translating to a 22% engagement rate. This suggested that the campaign reached a relevant and interested target audience, with whom the message clearly resonated. Our high-impact formats delivered a 5% click-through rate, with the best-performing creative, Advent Calendar, delivering a CTR of 10%. All ads were 100% viewable by design, since ad-spend was only activated when users opted into the brand experience. With regards to business objectives, we achieved extremely positive results for The Body Shop during Christmas 2017: 1. In-store footfall increased by 10% when compared to Christmas 2016 2. Sales revenue increased by 7% when compared to Christmas 2016

Young audiences in Asia-Pacific have a high propensity of using their mobile devices, but are also the least responsive to mobile advertising. As mobile users, we constantly feel, move and swipe our screens using our sense of touch. Our mobiles are packed with powerful technology such as gyroscope, accelerometer or haptic, which few advertisers are really taking advantage of. We recognised a golden opportunity to tap into mobile technologies and produce powerful ads coupled with incredibly strong, tactile creative that’s intuitive to the way we use our mobile devices. The mobile ads would be user-initiated; targeted users would either close the ad unit or deliberately participate in a mini brand-interaction. This would serve the dual purpose of delivering audience-led brand engagement, while ensuring that there were no media wastage; ad-spend would only be activated when consumers opted into the brand experience, based on an intentional, meaningful action; and not impressions.