Conventional advertising wisdom dictates that to reach your target audience you spend a lot of money and plaster your message absolutely everywhere.
What are you supposed to do, then, when you don’t have an open chequebook?
That was the challenge from Flordis – a growing natural medicines company – when they briefed us re-launch their newly acquired cough remedy Prospan – a natural cough syrup suitable for kids and adults thanks to its unique ivy leaf formulation.
INTRODUCING THE WORLD’S FIRST COUGH SIMULATOR
Despite 65 years’ global heritage, Prospan faced increasing competition in the natural cough relief category but unlike bigger healthcare companies, we simply couldn’t afford traditional “always on” advertising throughout the winter to drive sales.
Our approach required minimal budget wastage to ensure we only reached mums when their children were sick. Using first party and search data, we overlaid social, search strings, temperature, pollution and Medicare statistics to develop the world’s first ‘cough simulator’.
Next, we built a weather-polling app that set programmatic buying for 18 separate locations across Australia. An algorithm then triggered media budgets based on real-time temperature fluctuations to either minimise or increase spend.
RIGHT PLACE, RIGHT TIME, EVERY TIME
This innovative technology enabled us to deliver a powerful campaign message at precisely the right time that overcame a mum’s tendency to ignore a cough, and instead ‘fix it’, leading to our core creative idea: ‘Don’t ignore a cough’. To defuse any sense of lecturing to mums about not managing their children’s health, we also took a humorous approach using relatable family scenarios.
Sure, we could’ve simply targeted mothers of a certain age. But so could our competitors. Given our budgets and our client’s expectations to be smarter, our ground breaking hyper-targeting strategy honed in specifically on mums of children who were just about to come down with a cough.
Appearing in print, digital, social and POS, our innovative ‘Prospan It’ campaign proves it’s not always about spending the most money that wins sales. In fact, our innovative approach has achieved optimal engagement for our message and strongest value for investment, resulting in a 27% increase in sales.
Which is…ahem…nothing to sneeze at.
