LG, one of the world's leading consumer electronics companies, is constantly looking for new and inventive ways to market its products. LG Germany turned to Google to do just that. For the launch of its Optimus G smartphone, LG used a YouTube homepage masthead and complementary Lightbox Ads to create awareness, build engagement and drive conversions.
Goals
Create awareness and influence consideration of target audience for new Optimust G phone
Build brand engagement
Drive conversions
Approach
Use YouTube homepage masthead to generate awareness and consideration
Repurpose YouTube masthead in Lightbox unit to increase frequency and deepen engagement with users
Use remarketing to reinforce messaging to interested audiences
Results
Using creative from YouTube homepage masthead saves costs and frees up resources
Wide reach across Google Display—4.5M incremental impressions at no additional cost
1.54% engagement rate
Cost-effective pricing means paying only for engagements with qualified users
For more than 50 years, LG Electronics has built its reputation as one of the leading consumer electronics brands in the world. From washing machines and air conditioners to smart TVs and energy-efficient refrigerators, LG marries stylish design with smart technology in its products across varied domains. As a forward-looking brand, LG is always searching for inventive ways to market its products so that they reflect the company’s focus on innovation. It partners with Google for original and effective marketing solutions that resonate with consumers and mirror the LG brand.
We look at the main touchpoints along the customers' decision journey. We use Google and YouTube to reach consumers at several of those touchpoints for every campaign.
Reaching customers all along their decision-making journeys
For the past five years, LG Germany has worked closely with Google to build and execute its digital advertising strategies. Zeroing in on the customer experience and path to purchase, LG Germany has conducted extensive market research on how German consumers make decisions and how online activity affects offline purchases. “We look at the main touchpoints along the customers' decision journey,” says Gaylord Eicker, senior online manager at LG Germany. “We use Google and YouTube to reach consumers at several of those touchpoints for every campaign.”
With YouTube, LG Germany creates awareness and brand consideration with a wide audience. It then continues to build awareness while influencing consideration to move customers further down the purchase funnel using Engagement Ads, a new interactive ad format that lets advertisers create and scale beautiful brand messages across the web. One type of Engagement Ad is the Lightbox format, a standard IAB-sized unit that expands into a near fullscreen creative canvas once a user hovers over the ad for two seconds. Lightbox ads come in several eye-catching shapes and sizes, and they can even feature creative from a YouTube homepage masthead as the expandable unit.
Lightbox ads complement and extend YouTube homepage masthead
For the launch of its new Optimus G smartphone, LG Germany needed to create awareness of the product, build engagement with the brand and drive conversions. To achieve these goals on a large scale, it ran a YouTube homepage masthead—a 970x250 in-page creative that runs the full width of the German YouTube homepage below the navigation bar for 24 hours—for high-impact brand exposure to an average of five million viewers daily.
LG Germany then multiplied the power and reach of its YouTube homepage masthead with a Lightbox ad that expanded into the masthead once a user hovered over the ad. Because the Lightbox ad lets LG Germany scale its YouTube homepage masthead across the web without generating new content, LG Germany got more mileage out of its existing assets, with very little additional development costs. “Repurposing our creative from the YouTube homepage masthead to our Lightbox ads allowed us an incredible cost savings that we can invest elsewhere,” says Gaylord. In addition to cost savings, his team also realized significant time savings, as the Lightbox campaign was easy and quick to set up because the creative was already in place.
To show the YouTube masthead in Lightbox to users who demonstrated interest in the Optimus G and the LG brand, LG Germany used remarketing to target and increase frequency with people who had previously seen the YouTube homepage masthead. Using remarketing in this way helped LG Germany stay engaged with its target audience and reinforce the Optimus G launch message.
Building awareness and driving engagement and conversions
After running the Lightbox campaign for 2.5 weeks, LG Germany generated a 1.54% engagement rate. Because Engagement Ads are priced on a cost-perengagement (CPE) basis, LG Germany only paid when users hovered to expand the Lightbox ad, demonstrating interest in the brand. This means that the 4.5 million impressions received over the course of the campaign came at no additional cost to LG Germany. The company also achieved a strong conversion rate with Lightbox ads, and Gaylord says his team is so pleased with the results that it plans to extend this strategy of combining Lightbox ads with YouTube homepage mastheads to other campaigns.
Partners in innovation
As LG Germany moves forward, it’s looking for ways to expand upon its awareness campaigns and leverage social media channels to generate product reviews and positive word-of-mouth between users. Whatever the channel, the underlying focus for LG Germany is new technology and creative, original execution, which the company finds in its partnership with Google. Says Gaylord, “We appreciate the work Google does and its innovative products.”
