Challenge

Mobile advertising has a massive challenge – cookies, that have been traditionally used to measure the effect of brand advertising, don’t work on mobile.

"With cookies not working on mobile it was impossible to measure effect of brand advertising in a real life situation. On Device Research’s solution was right away of massive interest to us."

Working with MediaCom and Sony, byyd developed a brief to establish the effectiveness of the Sony Xperia Z1 ad campaign. The key was the ability to ask questions from people who had seen the ad, versus those who hadn't, and compare their responses.

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Research goals

• Measure the impact of brand metrics for Sony's mobile advertising campaign.
• Help Sony understand whether mobile advertising and in particular mobile programmatic buying is effective at changing consumer attitudes towards Sony Xperia Z1 and making consumers who were exposed to the camapign more likely to buy the device.

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Solution

Achieving the goals required a fresh approach to mobile advertising effectiveness. It was not enough to copy the “lab test” available on the market where visitors are exposed to the ad in a controlled environment.

1. Using the unique mobile IDs of two demographically matched and profiled groups of respondents (220 in each group) we targeted half of them with Sony’s ad campaign through byyd’s huge reach across the RTB exchanges.
2. People encountered the ads on mobile websites and in apps during their everyday browsing so they had no idea what was being measured.
3. Both the exposed and control group of users were then invited to a follow-up brand effectiveness and attitudinal survey via the On Device Research mobile app.

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Results

The project gave Sony, its media agency MediaCom, and byyd confidence that mobile ads can move brand metrics, and outperform online solutions.

• Awareness - spontaneous brand awareness raised from 37% to 60% among exposed group
• Interest - exposed audience twice as likely to consider solely an Xperia Z1 as their next phone
• Desire - "Very likely to buy" doubled among exposed audience, "very unlikely to buy" halved
• Action - "Very / somewhat likely to buy" increased from 49% to 64% among the exposed group

"This case study demonstrates how effective robust, open tech can be to research. Without byyd’s ‘Madison’ technology platform, working in such a precise, effective manner alongside On Device Research’s methodology, we would not have gained these valuable insights."

Daniela Federici, Digital Marketing Manager, Sony

The outcome enables byyd and its RTB ad platform to be judged on metrics other than a simple clickthrough (CTR), which is acknowledged nowadays to be of limited value to brand advertisers who want to gain as much insight into the true value of mobile advertising as possible.