MAGNET, NEEDLE & HAYSTACK: UTILISING AUDIENCE GUARANTEED TO CAPTURE AUDIENCES AND EVADE COMPETITION

Barclayloan is a loan product offered by Barclays, exclusively available to existing customers whose eligibility status is predetermined by Enhanced Risk Credit Assessments (ERA). As a result of the complex product eligibility criteria posed, OMD faced a number of challenges in delivering positive business impacts for Barclays through the use of programmatic display activity.

The overarching business objective for Barclays: to achieve a yearly CPA of no more than £200 for this product from paid media activity. OMD worked closely with Barclays to identify their eligible audiences, defining them clearly before developing ways to target them via programmatic display.

By connecting the client’s Data Management Platform (DMP) to our Demand Side Platform (DSP), we targeted pre-qualified audience pool via the Barclays CRM database. The approach improved efficiency significantly by reducing media wastage and allowed Barclays to re-invest budget savings to reach more of the eligible pool. However, this posed a new challenge of scale as only a limited proportion of the CRM audience data that sat within the Barclays DMP could be matched within the DSP. To address this we leveraged Google’s Audience Guaranteed (AG) product to help us achieve two goals: maximise reach against eligible audiences and gain competitive advantage versus other advertisers who may also be going after the same audiences.

The improved targeting and Audience Guaranteed strategy resulted in:

•A reduction in media wastage of 25%, and a saving of over £500k (based on Loans 2019 media budget)

•A 56% increase in incremental impressions to DMP audiences on eBay, and a 51% reduction in CPA vs programmatic auction environment

•A 17% reduction in total digital display campaign CPA versus the 2019 target •Audience engagement increased 63% YoY attributable to the implementation of dynamic creative optimisation

•A 48% reduction in CPM versus equivalent strategy run via Open Market