About the client
Marks & Spencer is a major British clothing, footwear, and accessories brand. The company owns 1300 stores around the world. The brand is represented in Russia’s largest cities: Moscow, St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, Krasnodar, Ufa, Vladivostok, and Novosibirsk.
The core target audience for Marks & Spencer is women between 30 and 55 years of age with above-average income. Their main interests are travel, dachas, family, children, music, theater, cooking, city festivities, fairs, self-care, and family shopping.
The company released a spring collection in February 2021. Along with Realweb, Marks & Spencer began planning an ad campaign with the goal of reaching a wide audience of users, informing them about the release of new products and increasing brand awareness.
To reach the maximum number of users, they decided to launch a display ad campaign in the Yandex Video Network.
Mechanism
During the campaign, two flights were launched in a row. The first promoted the new collection, and the second highlighted the release of a separate collection of denim items. Brand Lift research was conducted for the second flight along with Search Lift evaluation of growth in search queries.
Format
Both display campaigns used 11- and 15-second clips in Yandex.Direct, with horizontal videos for desktop and vertical and square videos for mobile formats. Women and men of different ages modeled items from the new collection in the clips.
Targeting
To achieve the set goals, the agency decided to test several different targeting types:
- Genres and topics: beauty and health, travel, family and children, shopping.
- Socio-demographic: women, aged 35-54, above-average income.
- Interests: beauty and health, clothing, footwear and accessories, leisure and travel, gifts and flowers.
- Family status: with children aged 3-6, 6-11, and 11-16.
- Behavioral indicators: shop online; visit clothing, footwear, and accessories stores; watch a lot of TV.
Results
Targeting
In the first flight, the best VTR was with targeting for “Genres and topics”, “Interests”, and “Behavioral indicators. Shop online”. In the second flight, targeting was added for “Behavioral indicators. Clothing, footwear, and accessories stores”.
Targeting by the behavioral indicator “Watch a lot of TV” resulted in the fewest conversions. This confirms that people who watch a lot of TV tend to be less active on the internet and less interested in online shopping. Learn more about users’ online behavior depending on the amount of TV they watch in our study.
Brand Lift
Brand Lift was launched in the second flight to assess the impact of advertising on brand metrics. Users answered the question: “Which brands are familiar to you?” The study found that brand awareness grew by 5%.
The largest growth (16%) was in the 34-44 age group, which is also the brand’s target audience. Growth among women was 3%, while it was 13% among men. Growth of 17% was observed among people with a high income. Among smartphone users, the increase was higher than among desktop users at 13% and 5%, respectively.
Search Lift
Agency comment
When choosing tools for reach, we look at how to evaluate brand awareness and impact on performance campaigns. We conduct Brand List and Search Lift to digitize the impact of advertising on brand metrics.
In this case, video campaigns helped increase volumes for branded search campaigns during the release of the new Marks & Spencer collection. Conducting an ad campaign in the Yandex Video Network helped us obtain key metrics for the client: new target audience reach and brand awareness growth.
As a result of the two media flights, we achieved excellent results in terms of view-through rate and cost per view, both coming in above planned values.
Campaigns in the Yandex Video Network helped us reach the target audience inexpensively, increase knowledge about the brand, and boost interest in it. Testing various types of targeting and analyzing the results of the BrandLift study also let us draw conclusions about adapting the communication strategy to different target audience segments in Yandex.
The client’s opinion
