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SUCCESS STORY

How to turbocharge an Awareness campaign with highly innovative optimization strategies

An extraordinary creative serving both the brand and reaching beyond benchmarks performance.

itsme® is the leading company in Europe on the front of digital identification, authentication, and signature. Launched in Belgium 5 years ago, it has disrupted the digital identity market, and is being used by 80% of 18-80 years olds in Belgium. eIDAS certified, its utmost security level has been recognized by all industry experts.

Today, itsme® is being used in Belgium to log in to pay taxes, access social security, log in to your bank account, change your mobile subscription, and has been instrumental in allowing for CovidSafeBE application enrollment.

Over 150 companies accept its protocol to identify yourself online, log in, confirm transactions or sign documents.

itsme® is the secure, user-friendly digital identity that respects your privacy.

The trigger

With its unique value proposition combining edge security, wide acceptance and extraordinarily convenient user experience, itsme® has become one of the most downloaded and best rated app in Belgium. However, a portion of users activate itsme® for a limited number of use cases, and would benefit from discovering its expanded potential.

The challenge was to motivate Belgian citizens and residents to increase their usage of itsme® from tax / pension / Covid pass (for example) towards banking and telco use cases on top of their existing usage. Concretely, how to maximize chances that users also engage to safely connect to their banking portal, or to their mobile operator portals. Creative agency Federate came up with a remarkable concept.

For the very first time, three leading banks in the country talk with one voice. And Mobile telco’s do the exact same.

Their common message ? “itsme® is the safest login.”

  • 100% aligned with ING, says BNP Paribas Fortis
  • BNP Paribas is trustworthy, answers KBC
  • KBC / CBC is absolutely right, says ING, and so on…

3 main goals:

  • Leveraging the huge brand power of the main banks and telco’s.
  • Allowing them to appear in a non confrontational / competitive position towards one another.
  • Supporting itsme® message and pushing even further the highest credibility of the app.

Remember the US based wars between Coke & Pepsi? Or the amazing fights between Ronald McDonald and Burger King?
Never before had brands taken the opportunity to agree rather than compete and take it that far.

We wanted to surprise the Belgian audience with this campaign. Let banks congratulate each other. Naturally and without conflict of interest. Because this is what it is all about: the security of all Belgian citizens and residents.

Sylvie Vandevelde,
CMO of itsme®

The Challenge

itsme® being THE security and data privacy app by design, no way to use transactional data from users for the purpose of targeting of course.

No way to tag the website and retarget individuals, nor use any app analytics to leverage client data in any form either. Still, we wanted to turbocharge performance and leverage awareness to maximize engagement of active users so as to have them use itsme® for bank and telco log in as well.

From a media point of view, the aim was to create awareness by :

  • Spreading the message as widely as possible among the Belgian population.
  • Making it crystal clear that itsme® is the most secure login.
  • Engaging the Belgian population and providing more information about itsme® banking & telco benefits. This campaign leveraged multiple assets (videos, stories, static visuals and carousel).

We deployed over 50 strategies, across OLV on premium websites in Belgium, YouTube, and Meta (both Facebook & Instagram).

Across platforms, for each strategy, we decided upfront to optimize performance with complementary KPI’s:

  • on CPM (Cost Per Thousand impressions) to reach and expose the Belgian population to the ad and itsme® brand with video, stories and static images.
  • on Cost per fully viewed video to maximize visibility of the full message and make it understandable with the video format.
  • on Cost per click on link to encourage viewers to learn about the itsme® brand with a dedicated web page on their website with the carousel format (engagement with the brand).

We optimized this awareness campaign according to 3 distinct but complementary objectives with specific assets. We also conducted a brand lift survey on Facebook to assess the impact of the ads and recall with these different targets.

The Impact

Overall, the campaign allowed for a combined reach of over 80% of the total population with controlled impressions per individual.

On Facebook, ThruPlay optimization delivered x15 improvement on Cost per completed view vs CPM Optimization.

Likewise, Click on link optimization delivered between X 2,8 et X 3,3 vs CPM and vs Thru Play.

On Display, View Thru Rate went above 70% (outstanding vs. typical industry benchmarks)

This methodology allowed us to reduce the CPM by 15% and the cost per full view by 10% for Facebook.

We also reached +35% completion rate of videos on connected TV’s vs other devices.

80 %

total population reached with controlled impressions per individual

+70 %

View Thru Rate On Display (outstanding vs. typical industry benchmarks)

+35 %

completion rate of videos on connected TV’s vs other devices

Learnings

In a world where relative uncertainty remains regarding true measurement of performance after 3rd party cookies, we allowed, together with itsme® teams and Federate agency, to

  • Deliver innovative and high performing optimization strategies without use of 3rd party cookies.
  • Deliver both Cost per video viewed and CTR results that stretched the best industry benchmarks, even vs. top performing financial institutions.
  • Define opportunities for more focus on 6sec bumpers optimization.
  • Prove the ability to measure and optimize upper funnel campaign despite the most constrained data context.

A real pride for Numberly teams to keep on innovating in performance strategies, succeed at scale, together with Federate and itsme® teams!