Challenge

Lunar New Year is one of the busiest periods for retailers in Singapore. That’s especially true for brands in the alcohol category, with many offering special promotions and sales.

Tiger Beer wanted to seize the opportunity to stay top of mind and boost affinity with consumers during this highly competitive time. The brand and its agency, Dentsu Red Star, decided to run a programmatic, sales-focused advertising campaign as part of its efforts for the January 2023 season.

Tiger Beer sought to understand the effectiveness of programmatic advertising on its sales. It wanted to know if people who saw programmatic ads would be more likely to buy Tiger Beer products. It also wanted to find out if complementary programmatic targeting solutions would drive incremental reach and improve return on ad spend (ROAS).

However, the team were faced with a lack of retail measurement solutions available in the market that could help them in tackling these issues head-on. Determined to find a solution, the brand embarked on a quest to understand how programmatic ads impacted sales targets, particularly as its products are largely sold via distributors and sales can’t be made directly via Tiger Beer’s website.

Tiger Beer and Dentsu Red Star discovered the perfect demand-side platform (DSP) in The Trade Desk, whose partnership with FairPrice Group, Singapore’s largest supermarket chain, provided valuable retail data. This is the first audience-and-measurement partnership that FairPrice has formed with a programmatic DSP. Taking advantage of this collaboration enabled Tiger Beer to connect its ad spend to online and in-store sales – an ability that’s considered by many to be the ‘Holy Grail’ of marketing – and reach FairPrice customers on the open internet, beyond social media or FairPrice-owned media platforms.

Solution

Tiger Beer and Dentsu Red Star activated display ad placements via The Trade Desk’s DSP to reach its target audiences across mobile, tablet, and PC devices.

To drive revenue and sales from the campaign in a cost-efficient manner, they used The Trade Desk’s DSP to access FairPrice’s audience segments. These high-value segments enabled Tiger Beer to target people on the open internet based on their past purchases, and then connect these ad exposures to sales at FairPrice through closed-loop measurement. So, as customers clicked on Tiger Beer’s programmatic display ads and made purchases via FairPrice’s website, app, or in-store purchases via the app, these conversions were recorded on The Trade Desk’s DSP.

Tiger Beer and Dentsu Red Star also pulled off a dynamic duo of targeting strategies to boost their ROAS. They used contextual targeting to reach people who had searched online for content relating to Lunar New Year and beer promotions during the festive period. Additionally, they got personal with their approach by targeting beer enthusiasts, dads, and people interested in football and nightlife.

Sales conversion data flowed into The Trade Desk’s DSP daily, enabling Tiger Beer and Dentsu Red Star to measure the campaign’s effectiveness across different strategies, devices, ads, audiences, and products in the lead-up to Lunar New Year.

These detailed metrics helped Tiger Beer and Dentsu Red Star make informed optimisations on the fly during the campaign to improve ROAS. These included increasing bids on The Trade Desk’s DSP to secure ad inventory at a time when audiences were likely to be the most valuable, and shifting ad spend to prioritise better-performing audience-targeting strategies. Tiger Beer and Dentsu Red Star also activated The Trade Desk’s Audience Booster, a feature that enhances campaign performance by automatically optimising to add high-value audience segments

Results

The campaign was a huge success for Tiger Beer, exceeding several of the brand’s key performance indicators and providing valuable insights into customer behaviour. Tiger Beer and Dentsu Red Star were particularly thrilled that the solution enabled them to accurately measure the direct impact of their ads on in-store purchases via the FairPrice app, which accounted for 96% of sales. ROAS outperformed the benchmark from past social media ad campaigns by 34 times (4,099%). This was largely driven by the retail data partnership between The Trade Desk and FairPrice, the activation of relevant audiences in The Trade Desk’s DSP beyond FairPrice audiences, and an increase in consumer spending during the Lunar New Year period.

In addition, cost per acquisition (CPA) for Tiger Beer’s programmatic campaign was 15 times lower than the benchmark from past social media campaigns. The high-value FairPrice audience segment turned out to be the most effective targeting strategy for Tiger Beer, driving the highest ROAS (5,730%) and lowest CPA, at 206% lower than the average of other audience segments. FairPrice audience targeting also had the shortest conversion cycle of 4.5 days specifically for online purchases. It was also discovered that 70% of Tiger Beer’s consumers were over 45 years old, which meant that the brand has a strong position with older demographics that drink standard beers instead of flavoured beers.

At the same time, contextual targeting resulted in the shortest conversion cycle of 4.8 days for online and in-store purchases. This strategy converted an impressive 71% of consumers within seven days.

Overall, the results proved that programmatic advertising was an effective way to boost brand awareness and affinity for Tiger Beer. It also showed the power of programmatic advertising with The Trade Desk to drive better performance across lower-funnel marketing, leading to increased conversions and maximised ROAS during the Lunar New Year period.