Online advertising for campaign visibility

Challenge

Online advertising provides great flexibility depending on which approach is taken. In the lead up to the European Space Week in Helsinki and the COP25 summit in Madrid, ECMWF partnered with Design & Data to create an online advertisement campaign to promote the events. We were tasked with creating web advertisements, geotargeting them to the specific locations where the events were taking place, and targeting the specific audiences that would be in attendance. These audiences would need to be filtered based on different variables, such as gender, income levels, education, and industry, which would then provide insight to which publications and online sources the display ads and banners would appear.

Idea, solution

For this campaign, Design & Data focused on creating online advertisements for Facebook, Google Display Ads, and Google AdWords platforms. We first created a campaign concept for each event by proposing what the web banners could look like. Once these were approved by the client, we developed different versions that were deemed suitable for the target audiences. According to the specifications of the online platforms, we liaised with the client to select a series of suitable search terms that would allow the target audiences to find the advertisements if they used specific search terms. Once the versions of the advertisements were created, we then delivered the web banners and display ads to external publications, namely The Brussels Times, Euractiv, EU Observer, and the Parliament Magazine.

Result

Following the close of the European Space Week and COP25 summit, we had excellent turnover results and clickthrough rates stemming from geotargeting the key audiences and locations. Using the Google Analytics of the webpages where the web banners and display advertisements ran, we could track how long people spent engaging with the content and how well the advertisement content linked to the events. We have been able to use these results to improve our future campaigns and increase our campaign outreach efforts.