As the marketing landscape continues to rapidly evolve, especially as updated privacy regulations create new hurdles to effective targeting, it’s no question that agencies must innovate to deliver results for their clients. Every day, teams at Known collaborate to reimagine how to optimize our media campaigns for some of the world’s largest brands. To do that well, our Ph.D. scientists, strategists and best-in-class creative minds need powerful tools that go beyond dynamic creative optimization (DCO) to offer insights quickly and at scale.
Skeptic, Known’s proprietary technology platform, enables a new fully integrated agency working model that elevates every team’s strengths.
It allows our teams to run large-scale experiments, derive rapid insights and reinject those learning points into a live campaign at any point in its lifecycle. Ultimately, this work is all in service of our North Star: achieving breakthrough results for our clients with more thoughtful, well-executed marketing campaigns. Skeptic is a smarter, more sophisticated data solution that helps brands not only reach more people, but more of the right people.
An integral part of Known’s operating system, Skeptic is a persistently optimized ecosystem of the best-of-the-best technological innovations and millions of lines of proprietary code. But just as Iron Man would simply be a high-tech suit without Tony Stark, so would Skeptic be without a legion of talented team members from across the agency to run it.
For client Just Egg, Known first designed, executed and analyzed a custom survey to answer key questions related to the plant-based food company’s first-ever brand campaign. We also designed and synthesized multiple measurement surveys, including both a brand tracking study and a campaign lift study.
Known’s marketing analytics team connected custom survey data to other syndicated datasets to develop valuable insights, which included identifying the most interested and relevant consumers to target for Just Egg’s campaign. Known leveraged Skeptic to identify and size multiple campaign micro-segments, including Just Egg “brand-unaware” prospective customers (key to target for building awareness) and other “aware” targets (key to target for increasing household penetration).
We also identified top campaign messaging themes and purchase drivers and built rich consumer profiles for each micro-segment to leverage for ongoing and future creative development. Using proprietary lookalike modeling techniques, Known’s data science team then projected micro-segments nationally for targeting and media activation.
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Skeptic gives us the muscle we need to spin our creative optimization flywheel.
As we collect performance data on the live campaign, Skeptic recommends budget reallocations and creative trimming, and we use the insights we’ve gathered from feature-based testing, a process that allows us to tag and test high-level creative descriptions to find out what performs best, and then use the results to inform the next round of creative asset production.
For Just Egg, we designed experimental grids to test a small set of creative assets (produced by creative agency Mythology and Just Egg) that would provide maximal information and ensure that all variants of each feature were considered equally.
We deployed the grids across social and programmatic platforms, and we measured performance based on mid-to-lower funnel actions. Our results included weighted feature importance, optimal feature combinations and champions within each feature category.
These insights were crucial in refining how we communicated with our target consumers on each platform and across the digital landscape. Our ad-based creative weight optimization allowed us to dynamically shift our served impressions toward top performing ads for our programmatic campaigns. We also leveraged insights from our campaign lift study to understand which channels and creative assets were most effective in driving our primary goal of boosting brand awareness, as well as lifting desired brand perceptions.
And the results show. From October 2021 to February 2022, Just Egg’s unaided brand awareness jumped 64%, with a 5x increase in branded search for consumers exposed to campaign ads (vs. an unexposed control group). For the same time period, Known observed a 249% increase in top-of-mind mentions in Just Egg’s brand tracking study.
In our experience, the connection between the creative process and campaign performance data is critical in driving success for our clients. With our proprietary technology and world-class talent, Known not only delivers against this promise, it’s our modus operandi.
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