How Corona Uses Data to Stay Creative and Boost VTRs

What do you get when you have an inspirational brand that combines creativity, entertainment and data? Exceptional performance results that won the Digiday 2022 Marketing and Advertising Awards Europe for Best Use of Data. 

This is exactly happened when Corona UK partnered with VidMob to amplify its Free Range Humans campaign with the use of Intelligent Creative. But more on this later. 

I’ve had the fortune of working with many creative and innovative brands in the past 15 years, but when a brand that knows how to push boundaries, constantly seeks new ways to connect with its consumers and focuses on flawless execution, that’s when you know you get phenomenal results. 

In 2020, Corona’s production studios created a collection of inspirational campaign content linked to its brand ethos, sharing eight stories of brave individuals who swapped office jobs for adventurous outdoor lives in an eight-part original series called Free Range Humans. The series positioned the brand as a champion for pursuing new discoveries and breaking with standard routines. 

But once the series launched, a new challenge arose: how to make sure people discover the  series, while doing so in a relevant and authentic way, especially on social media? Pushing out the exact same campaign episode snippets to multiple channels wasn’t an option. Tweaking its targeting parameters wasn’t going to cut it either. Corona soon understood it had to get a fuller picture of creative performance to stand the strongest chance of positive reception. We were up for the challenge. 

Our platform allowed Corona to embark on a deep, granular analysis of the content’s past performance, using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to quickly identify what worked, what didn’t, and why. VidMob’s Creative Analytics solution gave Corona access to advanced analytics to identify which aspects of its videos were responsible for each asset’s performance — good or bad — and to discover which combinations of creative elements were likely to drive high awareness on Facebook and YouTube, so it could adjust the videos accordingly.

The result? An in-depth analysis of the original Corona series revealed that many small factors were driving big performance differences. Findings included higher engagement for videos featuring group settings. But this didn’t mean that social elements such as music would work well. In fact, the content with only music fared worse than those using voiceovers. 

We also analyzed pacing preferences — with faster pacing performing 21% better on Facebook and slower pacing 141% better on YouTube — this underscored the need for a new strategic approach based on refined creative testing. 

Rather than opening the ads with attention-grabbing tracks, Corona’s agency decided to trial overlaid audio of tales told directly by adventurers, often leaning towards female speakers. Following the insight about pacing differences between channels, the team also opted to present faster-paced scenes for Facebook, while slowing down the action on YouTube. 

What was the impact finally? Using these new-found creative insights, Corona’s agency developed newly optimized ads and ran them in parallel with non-optimized ads. The final performance results prove the power of Intelligent Creative. The optimized ads fueled 21% higher three-second VTRs on Facebook, while YouTube gains reached viewing levels of plus 141%. 

Exceptional results that wouldn’t have been possible without the use of technology, data and most importantly a brand that’s willing to push the envelope, even in how it wants to tell its stories. 

Read more on The Role of Data in Measuring Marketing Effectiveness.