B&T Awards The Work: Best CTV Campaign Now Showing

Smart TVs are so prevalent these days, it’s hard to find a dumb one. And so while linear campaigns still make up the majority of branding ads, the clear benefits of utilising the smarts of a connected device will surely see The B&T Award for Best CTV Campaign, sponsored by Samsung, overflow in the years to come.

Judges applied the following criteria to whittle down the entries you can see below:

The jury will be looking for the best use of CTV in terms of proving measured ROI and meeting quantified business objectives. The entry should demonstrate how the campaign leveraged CTV to meet the client’s objectives, and deliver results. The jury will be looking for a strong creative insight specific to CTV; leveraging data and targeting capabilities of CTV to execution and appropriateness of strategy and solution to the original brief, as well as evidence of effectiveness and success. The campaign must have been live during the judging period.

Of course, now that you’re invested in shortlisted entries, why not come along and see who will be crowned the winners at the Hordern Pavilion on Friday 24 November 2023? Early bird tickets are limited so don’t run the risk of paying full price later.

Secure your table now!

And if you haven’t already, don’t forget to check out the entire short lists for the 2023 B&T Awards here and here.

Catch up on the other shortlisted work by clicking on the links below:

Below are the finalists for the B&T Awards Best CTV Campaign, with each heading showing the name of the agency, the name of the campaign and then the client footing the bill. The words are as submitted by the entrant.

Adobe Advertising/Merkle, a dentsu company, The CTV Effect: Uncovering the True Value of CTV, South Australia Tourism Commission

Awaken, Extremes, Panasonic Air Conditioning

Awaken Media was engaged by Panasonic to develop a creative campaign for their air conditioning unit featuring nanoe X air purification technology. The campaign aimed to elevate Panasonic from the 4th most popular air conditioning brand by resonating with homeowners aged 25-54 in Queensland, New South Wales, and Victoria who were looking to renovate or upgrade old systems.

Awaken chose to focus on the concept of “Extremes”, referencing the harsh climate conditions Australians often face, from scorching heat to chilling cold, bushfires to flooding. The campaign addressed these extremes through five persona-based creatives that catered to a variety of customer needs and concerns, such as heat, pet allergies, dampness, cold, and hay fever. Each creative exaggerated these conditions to showcase Panasonic’s capability in providing comfort in the most extreme circumstances.

The core of the campaign was a 15-second creative designed for high rotation. The campaign was created to be flexible, allowing it to target various audiences throughout the year and adapt to different seasons.

The ‘Extremes’ campaign succeeded in repositioning Panasonic from #4 to #3 in the air conditioning category, exceeding its goals with an impressive number of clicks to site (+2652% higher than forecast). The average CPA was also -99% more efficient than the forecast. Additionally, thanks to the winter creative ‘turn chilly to tropical’, the number of audiences requesting a Panasonic air conditioning installation quote increased by 63% YOY during the winter period.

https://www.awaken.media/bt-awards-2023-best-ctv

Howatson+Company, Thummit, Belong

Everest. It’s big. 8.849 kilometres in fact. That’s a long climb for a human with legs, even longer for a human thumb without them. Yet every month, our thumbs scroll this very distance, emitting carbon. We brought this story to life to remind Aussie’s that with Belong, their network usage is offset and they can Scroll Good. In our campaign,, ‘Thummie’ overcomes blizzards, scales cliff faces, and comes thumb to face with a Nepalese mountain yak; reaching the glorious summit and proving that our scrolling thumbs can live in harmony with nature.

As Australia’s first carbon neutral telco, Belong had long been able to differentiate on their ‘green’ credentials. However, competitors had since caught up by achieving carbon neutral status themselves and as a result, Belong needed to re-establish its green leadership position within the category.

This was executed by running 60” placements in tentpole moments on screens to deliver impactful reach, then supported by 30” placements to extend reach efficiently. CTV, online video and social provided further incremental reach efficiently, then leveraging large format OOH placements to deliver impact and drive research.

‘Thummit’ is Belong’s brand campaign aiming to reposition and re-establish the business as Australia’s leading green telco.

Key campaign objectives were to increase sales by 8% for the campaign period, and achieve a 10% YoY uplift.

Results:
• 10% sales increase during the campaign period
• 14% sales increase YoY

Howatson+Company, Second Life Phones, Belong

Belong identified an environmental issue it had the ability to positively impact: e-waste. It’s a growing concern in Australia and Belong did something about it by launching a range of second-hand phones in an effort to reduce e-waste by reducing the number of handsets in circulation.

Our challenge was not only to make Australians aware of this new product offering but to make second-hand technology desirable, in a market where consumers have been trained to believe newer is better.

Key business objective: increase brand lift by at least 2points.
To launch, we rethought the entire purchasing experience, from packaging that felt like a new iPhone box to a seamless online shopping experience.

Launching a new product requires awareness which we didn’t have a huge budget for. This meant we needed to use our budget wisely, by leveraging CTV to drive awareness of SLP offering for Belong.

We were also able to use data to narrow audiences and focus efforts on key audiences. CTV played a part of a wider screens approach – BVOD & YouTube (on CTV) to drive effectiveness. The ability to cap frequency across different placements meant we could drive stronger reach to grow brand awareness.

we targeted a wider audience with sequential lower-funnel proof-points and conversation comms while they were searching for information on the latest phone releases – convincing them in the process that buying a refurbed iPhone12Max with more features and for less cost was much better value than buying the new base model iPhone13 or iPhone14.

In the first 6months of the campaign running we saw a unique reach of 1.3m, with over 8m impressions.

We also saw a brand lift of +2.3pts for Unaided Ad Recall (up +4.4pt above the Telco benchmark), and up +1.8pts for Intent (up +1.1pts above the Telco benchmark).

Match & Wood, The Bedroom Binge, Snooze

THE BEDROOM BINGE

From it’s very first store to 81 locally owned franchises today, Snooze has been a beloved part of Australian homes for nearly half a century, and while our product range had evolved to capture a new generation, our communications had not.

Our challenge was to ensure the “succession of Snooze” as the bedding retailer of choice among young families.

The growth of Connected TV (CTV) offered a unique opportunity to communicate to our core demo 25-49s who over-indexed across all streaming platforms. And Binge, with their recent introduction of advertising, represented the perfect platform. Furthermore, according to the Sleep Foundation, 73.1% of people watch television before sleeping and 2 in 3 say it’s the only way they can keep up with their favourite shows. It appeared that the relationship between the bedroom and the binge has never been stronger, with CTV as our catalyst.

Guiding insight: Bed is the new binge

Opportunity: Help Sleepseekers ensure their bed is the best seat in the house

With a single programmatic seat but infinite options, we developed a three pronged approach:

1. ATTACH ourselves to tentpole moments. As an exclusive Binge advertising launch partner we aligned with the finale of ratings behemoth ‘The Last of Us’ – because the best place to hide from zombie mushroom humans is the comfort of your bed.

2. AMPLIFY across all major BVOD platforms including 7plus/9Now/Tenplay/SBS/Kayo/Foxtel. We paired household frequency caps and incremental reach optimisations delivered via Samba TV to ensure we amplified the bedroom binge, not interrupt it.

3. ACTIVATE by taking the partnership out of the bedroom and into the showroom – we became the first retailer to offer Binge subscriptions at checkout as an incentive to drive membership and conversion.

And we blew up brand metrics and sales metrics alike.

https://vimeo.com/850075120/2278628988?share=copy

SBS, SBS on Demand, SBS

How do you capture the attention of consumers amid an increasingly overcrowded CTV space? SBS partnered with Samsung to leverage automatic content recommendations and unique targeting solutions to drive new levels of consumption and engagement on the SBS On Demand Platform.

For SBS On Demand, we know only 2% of viewers consider us their go-to content platform and connected TVs contribute to 50% of our total consumption. Winning in this space was crucial so we set out to increase SBS On Demand CTV app watchers by 10%.

The ‘point of purchase’ in a streaming context is the moment someone sits down in front of their device to watch something. 64% of smart TV viewers have no formal plans on what to watch prior to sitting down to their TVs* and the majority of smart TVs have Netflix pre-installed. Samsung is SBS On Demand’s most consumed platform of all 16 supported devices, and yet we only have 7% of the total Samsung viewership in Australia* regularly using our app. This was the gap to solve for.

We partnered with Samsung to activate an always-on national presence supporting top tier shows and our extensive lesser-known back catalogue, using automatic content recognition (ACR) technology, third-party segmentation and Samsung viewership data to continually optimise our approach. We profiled non-users by taste segments such as comedy, drama and experian/mosaic third-party data. Plus, we experimented with A/B testing single versus multi-title sells and brand messaging.

Our partnership resulted in:
98% uplift in viewership to those exposed to our app
30% increase in monthly average watchers for the SBS On Demand app on Samsung devices during the judging period, versus our target of 10%

The Brand Agency x Finecast, a part of GroupM Nexus, Always Hunting (For Coffee), Hunt & Brew

It’s human nature to search for the best coffee in our areas, always Hunting for recommendations. In this trailblazing CTV campaign, Perth based agency, The Brand Agency partnered with Finecast, GroupM Nexus’ addressable TV solution to bring Hunt and Brew’s Always Hunting (For Coffee) to Aussie coffee lovers nationally. Hunt and Brew are pioneers in the cold brew category, which is worth $32.4M in Australia today. Currently Hunt and Brew are the #2 player in their category, this campaign is a market leading example of how an Australian underdog in the RTD coffee space, improved their brand awareness, increased consideration and almost doubled their sales off the back of their 16-week CTV campaign by combining the power of creative insight, data and innovation.

Wavemaker x Finecast, a part of GroupM Nexus, ID Fuelled Pizza, Domino’s

In the QSR category in Australia, every TARP is sacred, every reach point revered. Consistent delivery across days, dayparts and postcodes, is critical to sales success. With audience fragmentation and media inflation significantly impacting the effectiveness of Domino’s primary revenue-driving channel (Linear TV), successful screen mix evolution was paramount to ensuring future success.

Increased BVOD was a logical solution. However, added complexities of effective reach and frequency controls within CTV environments, duplication of ads in commercial breaks, as well as household level audience targeting was something Dominos needed to solve in order to maintain ROI. This campaign is an outstanding demonstration of how using CTV has created postitive provocation for Domino’s. Domino’s are using CTV to maximize effectiveness, creating touchpoints with their customers at the times that matter most, and playing a pivotal role in delivering better ROI.