How French telecommunications giant Bouygues Telecom used personification to engage audiences and promote its Sustainable Smartphone program

As we enter the era of cookieless and IDless advertising, we are very keen on solutions like Ogury that allow us to both engage the right audience with precision and deliver impactful messages through innovative, high-visibility, and sustainable advertising formats.

Anne Pézard-Alix
Head of Branding & BtoB, Bouygues Telecom

To promote its Sustainable Smartphone Solutions program, Bouygues Telecom set up a multi-levers campaign, encompassing the press, television, and digital. For the latter, the French operator sought to leverage an advertising technology capable of identifying its target audience and engaging them on their smartphones without collecting any personal data.

Leveraging personas to identify audience interests

Throughout this campaign, which ran from February to May 2022, the telecommunications operator implemented a number of digital activations alongside its agency Blue449 (Publicis Group). In addition to other players, the brand called on Ogury, the global leader in personified advertising, whose role was to identify the target audience and engage it with fully on-screen video ad formats, where 100% of the pixels are in view for the entire ad duration, all without resorting to data collection or intrusive tracking. To do so, Ogury leveraged its Personified Advertising technology, which is based on personas and the destinations where they consume content, instead of the individual users themselves. This targeting allowed Bouygues Telecom to accurately determine the habits and behaviors of their target users – including those with a strong interest in ethical consumption, refurbished smartphones, and in-store repair programs.

Using fully on-screen engaging formats

Campaign outreach was conducted in three phases. Phases one and two took place one month apart, during which a number of impactful mobile video ads were broadcasted to raise awareness of Bouygues Telecom’s new Sustainable Smartphone Solutions program. The third phase was designed to support the previous video branding phases with display activations around that same theme, deployed to generate traffic on the brand’s website. These complementary formats (i.e., video branding and display) enabled Bouygues Telecom to increase awareness of the four components of their Sustainable Smartphone Solutions program: repair, refurbishment, recycling, and trade-in. Thanks to accurate targeting that respects consumer privacy and engaging formats, the operator achieved conclusive results, with consumers actively inquiring about these offers following their exposure to the advertising messages set up by Ogury.

Results

To analyze the results of this video campaign, Ogury used the Fully On-Screen Rate for 50% duration, a metric that relies on 100% of pixels being in view for at least half of the video duration. This new metric is available through all major third-party measurers and goes beyond the traditional Video Completion Rate (VCR), which, although an advertiser favorite, can be misleading. This is especially true on mobile when users scroll down a page, effectively moving the video ad, which will continue to play while only partially on screen or completely below the waterline. The two video branding phases generated an average of 75% for the Fully On-Screen Rate for 50% duration, with impressions 100% viewable on screen for at least 7.5 seconds, and an average VCR of 77%. The advertising campaign delivered a CTR superior to 5%, with nearly one minute spent by mobile users on the Bouygues Telecom website. Moreover, this campaign achieved +90% visibility according to MRC standards and an outstanding ad recall, with an uplift of over 34 points.