Michael Hill.
- Programmatic
The Client
In 1979, Sir Michael Hill and his wife Christine opened their first jewellery store with a simple yet groundbreaking vision: to make fine jewellery accessible to everybody. 40 years later, Michael Hill has more than 300 stores across Australia, New Zealand & Canada.
From 1979 until now and into their future, Michael Hill’s commitment is to create jewellery made with a focus on quality, responsibility, and authenticity.
The Objective
Mother’s Day represents a critical moment in the annual communications calendar for Michael Hill. This year, the aim was to empower their customers to show their love and appreciation for the maternal figures that have helped guide them through some of the toughest years with an ongoing pandemic and a number of natural disasters.
This was done through a powerfully emotive story promoting a unique collection designed by Lady Christine Hill symbolising strength and celebration of inner-strength and grace under pressure.
Our objective was to tell this story, and showcase the collection through video-led paid media channels.
The Challenge
YouTube has remained a stable part of our media mix, offering reach and consideration to a diverse range of audiences with an affinity for our brand and our products.
A challenge that has surfaced from previous campaigns was that our longer-form content was being skipped by 50-60% of our audience, which meant our stories were often left half-told.
We needed to find a better way to design a communication framework without YouTube that takes into account frequent skippers, and finds other ways to tell our story to them in a way that suits them.
The Solution
We leveraged a functionality of YouTube known as ‘ad-sequencing’ or ‘sequential messaging’.
The premise was simple. We served our beautifully designed 30 second advert to our core audiences, and based on how they interacted with it, sent them on a unique story telling path.
- Users that watched our 30 second ad were followed up with our 6 second cutdowns to serve as reminders & frequency builders in the lead-in to the day.
- Users that skipped our 30 second ad were followed up by our 15 second cutdowns so they could be told the full story in shorter blocks, and were then served our 6 second cutdowns in the lead-in to the day.
The Result
When mapped out, this looks like the following sequencing chart:
This user-driven approach to serving the right videos, to the right people, in the right way proved extremely effective.
To compare apples ^ apples, we compared our standard YouTube strategy in 2021, to the innovative sequential strategy in 2022.
Overall, the campaign achieved a 105% improvement on click-through rate, an improved average completion rate of 11% and maintained a cost-per-completed view of $0.02.
By evolving our YouTube strategy this year to harness the power of the latest sequential messaging technology, we’ve been able to tell Lady Christine’s story to a much wider group of potential buyers, in the way they prefer to hear from us.