Case study Nissan

Background

Nissan Europe’s digital advertising campaigns are run centrally across several European countries. The company is looking for ways to harmonize its campaigns and give European countries some flexibility without compromising on performance and streamlining objectives. They therefore want their local teams to be able to choose the most appropriate messages, visuals, slogans and USPs for their region. With so many possible options, using DCO as part of its online banner advertising strategy is essential for Nissan.

This new way of working will also require tools capable of measuring and optimizing the impact of campaigns, providing insights at both country and head office levels.

Nissan Europe therefore turned to ADventori for support and advice in rolling out and running these international DCO campaigns.

All scenarios, texts and images can be edited and posted online in record time.

Objectives and challenges

The main challenges included:

• Implementing centralized project governance involving all campaign stakeholders: the global agency (Nissan United), local agencies (OMD for media and TBWA for creative) – 60 people speaking five different languages
• Maintaining consistency across all ads despite the different offers in each country
• Streamlining creative costs and optimizing targeting (CTAs, messages and USPs)
• Applying the same process and launch date in all countries
• Providing comprehensive and consistent statistics
• Generating online traffic and conversions (using the car configurator and the dealership’s test drive booking feature) according to the audience segments and sub-segments used.

Our services

ADventori worked with Nissan Europe and each country in the following areas:

• Rolling out a DCO always-on campaign in the selected countries
• Facilitating country-specific training and co-creation meetings
• Coordinating the various stakeholders
• Managing trafficking and ad serving for all display campaigns
• Streamlining creative production resulting from the increase in messages and improving the creative update process
• Testing and optimizing messages based on their performance (various KPIs).

Our solutions

The simultaneous roll-out of Nissan’s always-on campaigns to five countries was underpinned by ADventori’s Data-Driven Creative technology, which updates advertising banners dynamically in real time.

Using creative and data elements combined with business challenges, ADventori developed several creative scenarios for each car model and country. The CTA, USP, creative timeline, offers, messages, colors, devices and landing pages are personalized for each country. More than 200,000 banners have been dynamically generated.

During campaign launch, ADventori provided support and advice to Nissan in the following areas:

• Campaign governance between media agencies, creative agencies and advertiser in each of the five countries, monitored by an ADventori project manager
• Development of a scenario matrix covering all strategies and audiences for each country
• Campaign management and analysis including multivariate testing, tracking and site-centric tagging by market and model, used to retarget scenarios and measure conversions
• Production of HTML5 creative assets using a meta-template aligned with Nissan’s visual identity, built to respond automatically to each scenario in Nissan’s strategy, by country
• Implementation of a shared file connected to the data flow, allowing Nissan to update assets (e.g. text, images, offers) in real time
• Implementation of a reporting system that consolidates Sizmek and ADventori ad-centric statistics, DSP media costs and Omniture site-centric statistics so that costs can be constantly monitored and optimized
• Workshops and training for media coordination and creation
• Regular results review and optimization workshops

Campaign scenarios are based on the different USPs of each vehicle:

• For acquisition, testing the best performing USPs, messages and CTAs for each audience, country and model
• For retargeting, optimizing the most relevant USPs, messages and CTAs based on page views, actions performed and the level reached in the conversion funnel.

ADventori’s creative meta-template 

Ad serving for data-driven campaigns requires advanced HTML5 technology. ADventori’s Creative Lab uses a creative meta-template designed to ensure that each element of the ad is dynamic and connected to a data source while also satisfying the logic of a particular scenario.

A library of creative frames has been built and is used to assemble a targeted banner on the fly.

ADventori’s meta-template allows ads to be displayed and tailored in real time according to the user’s profile.

This creative structure means that more than 200,000 dynamic messages can be displayed, in all formats used in the always-on campaign.

Examples of banners with the meta-template

Results

• Creative costs reduced by a factor of 9
• +30% performance in personalized vs. non-personalized content
• Campaign launch time reduced from 1 month to 2 weeks
• USP insights gathered by audience to qualify and improve ads and audience segments
• Optimization of the performance of each creative idea through the multivariate tests performed.