Just because someone doesn’t have a smartphone doesn’t mean she doesn’t need shampoo.
But reaching her with the right message on mobile is a knotty challenge, as P&G Indonesia learned while developing a media plan to promote the launch of a new anti-dandruff shampoo from Pantene.
Indonesia is a nation comprised of thousands of islands with a large rural population and smartphone penetration of just 20%.
Because mobile audiences in Indonesia are so fragmented, marketers usually turn to television when they want reach. Ninety-six percent of Indonesians tune in to TV at least once a week.
But P&G wanted to get targeted with its message, said Berlian Dewirani, the brand’s Indonesian media manager, “so we could reach as many people as possible at one time but also be really efficient about it.”
The problem was that Dewirani and her team didn’t have the data to segment users by smartphone type. It would be a waste of time and money to send rich media creative to feature phones, and a lost opportunity to send SMS messages to people with smartphones.
Telcos, though, know exactly what type of handset their subscribers use, and they also have a lot of other data points that could be used for targeting, including average revenue per user (ARPU), which is a fairly accurate proxy for socioeconomic class and a good predictor for how much someone is likely willing to spend on products in future.
And so P&G and its media agency, Mediacom, partnered with Out There Media, a Vienna-based ad platform that helps regional carriers monetize their subscriber data.
Out There Media targeted 25 million females ages 15-55 across Indonesia with messaging and creative that varied depending on their phone type, ARPU, data plan and whether they lived in a small village or a large city.
“This made it easy to deliver different assets to specific devices,” Dewirani said. “For high-end smartphone users with high ARPU, we could provide a video with a link, for smartphones with low to medium ARPU we pushed banner ads and, for feature phones, it was something as simple as a text message.”
The end result was “micro-targeting at scale,” said Out There Media CEO Kerstin Trikalitis.
“If I’m P&G, I want to reach all women, whether they’re rich or poor, rural or urban,” she said. “A housewife with five children in a rural village without an internet connection is as much a potential customer for this shampoo as someone who lives in a city and has a smartphone.”
The message clickthrough rate for the campaign was 3.1%, well above the average industry benchmark of around 0.5%. Pantene also saw a 4% increase in market share across Indonesia. According to Dewirani, the cost-per-click and cost-per-engagement rates came in below what P&G is used to seeing.
The creative was important, but the campaign’s success was founded on reliable data, Trikalitis said.
“This isn’t probabilistic cookie-based data that we’re talking about,” she said. “Telco data is deterministic. Carriers know where someone lives, when they move and how much they’re likely to spend – but, more importantly, they know that this data is accurate.”
