Durex wanted to position itself as a healthcare brand with purpose, so the team approached Automated Creative to help them better understand their target market's attitudes towards sex, sexuality, and relationships. They wanted to get closer to their customers to provide them with helpful education and counsel. Automated Creative delivered.

By using social listening data, brands like Automated Creative can dive deeper into the why behind consumer motives. We spoke to Automated Creative’s Director of Client Strategy Amy Wright to discover how Brandwatch helped to deliver results with the Durex campaign.

Durex’s objectives with Automated Creative

Reckitt’s global CARE team, in partnership with Durex’s South-East Asia team, approached Automated Creative with the aim to reposition the brand and recruit consumers into a CRM program. As a premium brand, Durex wanted to validate its role in the lives of consumers, while strengthening its positioning in line with its overall social purpose.

Automated Creative was tasked with helping the brand run an acquisition campaign on Facebook. To inform the campaign, the team collected public, online data that revealed important insights about the consumer base across the APAC region, with particular focus on the Philippines.

The team at Automated Creative aimed to use Brandwatch Consumer Research to understand the relationships of Durex’s audience to help the brand better align with its target market.

The Automated Creative team reviewed a huge amount of data across markets in Asia, including six different languages. They started by diving deep into social listening research to better understand how the target audience viewed intimacy from a personal, couple, and societal perspective. This helped to identify themes which would inspire creative content and shape the role Durex can play in their audience’s lives.

“Brandwatch is one of the very few platforms that has this type of scope and reach. The other advantage was that we could look over lots and lots of different types of conversations on different platforms over quite an extended period of time. And it was a really exciting project.”
— Amy Wright, Director of Client Strategy, Automated Creative

Due to the sensitivity surrounding sex and relationships on a personal level, Automated Creative analysts needed the ability to scan public forums as well as social media sites. This is where Brandwatch came in. Our platform allowed them to dive into anonymous posts which are common on such forums so they could get a more holistic insight into Durex’s audience. The results exceeded expectations.

"One thing that was really crucial was the fact we were able to not just search social media platforms, which we typically look at, but also forums – because a lot of really rich content we found was posted more anonymously.
— Amy Wright, Director of Client Strategy, Automated Creative

The findings

Automated Creative’s client had preconceived ideas of their audience which was influencing their marketing strategy. They assumed their audience would be conservative in their beliefs, but in reality they found the opposite.

“Our client was quite surprised with a lot of the findings. They definitely came into it with some preconceptions about what their markets were like. They had this overwhelming perception that their markets were very, very conservative. And they are culturally, however, there is a real need – particularly among a younger audience – for sex.”
— Amy Wright, Director of Client Strategy. Automated Creative

Automated Creative had found an opportunity to communicate with the audience. Brandwatch’s sentiment analysis showed that their audience felt let down by the education system, offering a gap for Durex to come in and provide informative content.

Using the data to inform campaigns

Using the data, Automated Creative pitched ideas to Durex. While initially surprised with the findings, a visual trend analysis proved that there was an opportunity to connect with Durex’s audience in Asia.

Using their team of experts, Automated Creative divided their Brandwatch insights into selected themes and topics and then ran hundreds of ads against each topic. The goal was to create content surrounding sex education which would be shared on Viber, a popular instant messaging platform in Asia.

Automated Creative were able to test hundreds of variations, providing a strong foundation of data they could learn from for their client. Combining this with their ability to react and optimize ads as the campaign progressed, Durex could be safe in the knowledge that this campaign would be well-received. And it was.

“Automated Creative’s unique approach made us challenge our assumptions and biases about our audience. The results were well beyond our expectations.”
— Sumati Nagrath, Senior Content and Consumer Experience Strategist, Reckitt Global CARE team

Going above and beyond: The results

Automated Creative were able to exceed the targets set for the campaign. By responding to the pain points outlined in their research, they were able to provide more leads for a much cheaper cost than the client’s target benchmark.

“Our campaign delivered four times the amount of expected signups. And it had a 286% cheaper CPA than their target benchmark. We ran a total of 225 ads across the entire campaign.”
— Amy Wright, Director of Client Strategy, Automated Creative

The average click through rate (CTR) was three times higher than Durex had seen before. This proved how engaged the audience in Philippines was with this educational content. And better still, these insights are set to inform their local market strategies moving forward.

Using Consumer Research, Automated Creative were able to exceed expectations for their clients. With the data to justify their ideas, they were safe in the knowledge that their campaigns would see great results.

Published on June 22nd, 2024