How Ford engaged audiences without data collection or intrusive tracking

“Ogury is at the forefront of mobile advertising solutions, particularly with new performance standards such as the Fully On-Screen Rate for 50% Duration. Their results are very impressive thanks to innovative, immersive and non-intrusive ad formats. This makes Ogury a preferred partner for our digital campaigns, and allows us to offer an enriched advertising experience to our consumers.”

Amaïa Bady
B2C Communication Specialist, Ford France

“Our priority has always been to deliver the best results to brands. With solutions like those developed by Ogury, we are able to effectively measure the impact of the campaigns we set up for our clients.”

Karen Sonigo
Director of Digital Operations, Mindshare France

Ford, one of the leading car manufacturers in the French market, has been pushing the boundaries of innovation for decades. To promote its Kuga Hybrid model, the brand set up a multi-levers digital campaign in partnership with creative agency GTB and media agency Mindshare (GroupM), both members of the WPP group. These agencies wanted to call on a mobile advertising specialist, capable of identifying the brand’s target audience and engaging them effectively on smartphones.

Solution

In keeping with its tech-savvy brand identity, and on the advice of Mindshare, Ford partnered with Ogury to accurately identify its target audience and engage them with high-impact and visible ad formats, all without collecting personal data or intrusive tracking.

For this campaign, which ran from September 6 to September 19 of 2021, Ogury leveraged its Personified Targeting technology, enabling Ford to accurately identify the interests of its target audience – people with a strong interest for electric and hybrid vehicles – without resorting to collecting personal data.

Ogury’s Personified Targeting solution is built on 7 years of data collected from consenting users and the analysis of the apps and sites they have visited. In 2020, having accumulated enough insights into online user behavior on a global scale, Ogury put an end to this data collection, making its targeting technology completely independent of cookies and advertising IDs. To ensure their relevance, these insights are constantly updated and validated by surveys across large panels of users.

In terms of outreach, the campaign was conducted in two phases. The first phase, which focused on awareness, consisted of an impactful mobile video ad to educate the public about the brand and its hybrid model. In the consideration phase, which came second, Ogury leveraged their Site Scroller format. This fully on-screen format allowed the brand to engage its target consumers through an interactive microsite embedded in the ad format.

As fewer and fewer mobile users are accepting ad tracking, the ability to measure traffic to online sites as a result of an ad placement has drastically decreased. The Site Scroller format helps fill this gap and understand how the mobile user engages with the message. With this format, Ogury was able to measure interactions with the different elements of the message, such as the engagement rate for each part of the format through swipes and time spent.

Results

To help Ford analyze the impact of this video campaign, Ogury used a new metric called Fully On-Screen Rate for 50% Duration, where 100% of pixels are in-view for at least half of the video duration. This metric – available through major third-party measurers like IAS, Oracle MOAT or DV – goes beyond the simple Video Completion Rate (VCR). VCR is widely used by advertisers but can be misleading, especially on mobile. Indeed, the user can very well scroll down the page, leaving the video to continue playing while being partially on screen, or completely off-screen. This means that a high VCR rate can be recorded, but what is its value if the ad message is no longer on-screen?

The campaign’s awareness phase achieved a 68% Fully On-Screen Rate for 50% Duration. With an average VCR of 80%* and a viewability rate of 92%, the campaign significantly outperformed the market standards, at 57.4% and 62.2%** respectively. The consideration phase generated an 11% engagement rate (with an average of 2.4 swipes per user). What’s more, users spent an average of 8 seconds on the format.