Insight
Axe is one of the world’s most popular male grooming brands marketed towards the young male demographic. For years, the Axe brand appealed to stereotypical “bros” using comedy and exaggerated ads about how Axe would turn them into chick magnets. But as ideas of what is masculine have adapted, Axe has tried to step away from the single-minded messaging to richer, more meaningful advertising. With its latest video ad, “Find Your Magic,” Axe aimed to shed traditional ideas of masculinity by encouraging men to embrace their individuality and their own sense of how to be a man.
Axe’s challenge was to change the perception of the brand by moving to this more thoughtful messaging about manhood. Axe planned to do so in a format that would be equally effective, new and different as the campaign’s messaging. Axe launched its ads with inRead Vertical, a native video format designed for the natural, vertical size and usage of the mobile screen.
While in the past TV has always been the best channel to achieve reach, recently the market has seen a heavy shift in consumer behaviour from TV to digital media for video viewing, with mobile at the forefront. As users are more averse receptive to advertising on mobile and more sensitive to intrusiveness, native vertical video has quickly risen as the next generation star mobile video platform. With the help of the inRead platform, Axe became the first brand to launch a campaign using native vertical video on mobile via programmatic in LatAm.
Strategy
To drive brand and ad awareness in the region, Axe used a thirty-second video spot adapted into Spanish from its original “Find Your Magic” campaign in English to target young males between the ages of 15 and 30. Because their audiences’ interests include luxury, sports, technology and entertainment, Axe opted for programmatic distribution of the campaign using Teads’ supply-side platform (SSP) and Google’s DBM for their DSP to improve reach, targeting and performance. The mobile video campaign ran in Mexico, one of LatAm’s biggest markets for digital video viewing, from May 1st to May 31st, 2016.
With the company’s objectives for this campaign being brand awareness and reach, it still allocated a small portion of its media mix to TV and OOH, while the rest focused on digital resources. Axe’s digital strategy included running video ads on desktop and through social media channels, using instream and outstream formats. However, for a more successful digital distribution and to bolster both reach and viewability, Axe used the latest innovative outstream format, inRead Vertical, and Teads' advanced programmatic SSP, to run its video ads natively across mobile devices.
Mexico is seeing a surge in digital video viewing, particularly on smartphones. According to Millward Brown, of the 240 daily minutes users in Mexico spend watching videos, more than half are spent on digital devices, surpassing TV. And of the time spent viewing videos on digital devices, smartphones surpassed both computer and tablets combined. What’s more, viewing vertically accounts for 29% of viewed video time, a figure that’s expected to grow immensely especially amongst millennials.
With a mobile-first video approach in mind, Axe turned to inRead Vertical, the only native vertical premium video format available in LatAm, to help connect the brand to its consumer in the most effective and immersive way.
Execution
Currently, over 60% of traffic to Mexico’s top online news sites comes from mobile devices. inRead Vertical allows brands to natively reach users across any mobile device, positioning the video unit within the editorial content of a publisher site, expanding upon user response. The innovative format, designed exclusively for mobile, leverages the user’s natural vertical use of the phone and size of the screen, to give users a unique, captivating full-screen video experience.
Axe’s younger target demographic is particularly drawn to vertical formats on mobile due to the nature in which they are already engaging daily with video through platforms like Snapchat. In fact, Snapchat reported nine times more increase in views on vertical versus horizontal video formats. Because vertical video feels natural for these consumers, Axe could connect more organically with their audience by using inRead Vertical, delivering the brand message to all four corners while providing a more personal user viewing experience.
In addition, the opt-in video unit includes skipping capabilities from the start and user-controlled sound, respecting their choice to view the advertisement, leading to more completed views and reduced ad-blocker adoption. A recent study demonstrated that users recognise outstream formats as non-intrusive compared to pre-rolls. Particularly in mobile, users are more sensitive to intrusive ads and less receptive to long ads. Hence, a native outstream format was key for Axe.
Results
Axe's video media partner provided an innovative vertical video ad format for mobile and its robust network of premium publishers in their SSP, to help the brand capture increased reach, while creating a highly improved user experience. With Axe’s goal of pushing a new progressive message, the quality of reach was equally important as quantity. Axe relied on its video media partner's contextual targeting capabilities, together with programmatic distribution to reach a more relevant and engaged audience, subsequently optimising its ROI and boosting completed view rates.
The results were outstanding and establish a standard for the future of oustream mobile vertical video campaigns. Overall, inRead Vertical delivered almost 1.2 million impressions resulting in 582K completed views. That equates to an almost 50% completed view rate. Other widely known outstream video formats couldn’t come close with an average completion view rate of 6%. While other known instream formats saw view rates as high as 30%, 20% below the inRead vertical video.
Axe’s superior campaign results are a testament to mobile video, the vertical format and the use of programmatic in today’s market where these platforms continue skyrocketing in growth and effectiveness for reaching and connecting with consumers.