Interview: Smart ads for smart home products – Panasonic’s impressive audience extension with adblock advertising

Benedict C. Doepfer, Manager New Business Development at Panasonic Marketing Europe, does not hesitate to break new grounds and is rewarded with a successful display campaign performance on the AdDefend adblock reach.

AdDefend: Benedict, can you define the concept and the objectives of your campaign?

Benedict C. Doepfer: We wanted to reach customers who did not know about our product before with a short but intense campaign. In so doing, we aimed at generating the highest possible attention and interest in our smart home product combinations. If you like, we combined ads with a short-term product test. It was about getting a concrete feedback in the quickest and most uncomplicated way to see where we stand in order to define the next steps. Our product development is agile; our marketing needs to keep up with this tempo so that we can quickly return relevant data. The fact that adblock users can no longer be reached with display marketing via regular channels has made this target group particularly interesting for us. They are exposed to significantly less advertisement compared to the remaining 75% of German online users which is why they react more open and attentive to ads. AdDefend displays ads to adblocker users. Their data showed high performance rates – consistent with our goal of high response rates.

AdDefend: Your answer already implied that your main intention was to generate attention and performance (views and clicks). What is the concept of the design and why did you choose the AdDefend platform for its distribution?

Benedict: The cooperation with AdDefend was a proactive partnership. They understood our need and supported us with the implementation at every step. We chose a billboard that was displayed to adblock users on the AdDefend platform for 20 days in November 2017. The campaign achieved 3.5 million impressions at an above-average click rate of 0,35%.

AdDefend: That sounds like a great success. Are you convinced of the performance of the campaign?

Benedict: Yes, I am absolutely convinced and pleasantly surprised. My team and I had high expectations of the campaign results, not least because of the positive benchmarks that AdDefend presented – and the performance speaks for itself. It is a targeted investment that can be implemented in no time. With only one click, we could reach 10.000 relevant users from our target group – Potential customers we would have missed without adblock advertising. The AdDefend platform enabled us to attract attention and introduce our new product. We are very happy with the results.

AdDefend: Did you and your team have any concerns addressing adblock users with your ads?

Benedict: There were also some critical opinions in the beginning, but we have planned the whole concept thoroughly. We came to the conclusion that adblock users feel bothered by obtrusive ads that overlay the actual content of pages for instance – but they do not reject ads in general. According to the AdDefend policy, we designed our billboard unobtrusively and chose positions on the pages that did not overlay any content nor distract the user experience. We gave it a try and it worked out perfectly.

AdDefend: What are the results of the campaign?

Benedict¬: It was all about attention. As I said, we could reach more than 10.000 potential customers for whom our product would otherwise have remained invisible on the internet – Users that proved with one click that they react positively to, if I may say so, well-made advertising. The time spent on our landing page of the adblocker target group exceeded the average as well. We used the results of the campaign to draw valuable conclusions about the performance of our website. These data gave us new impetus for the redesign and optimization of our site, but also for our communication in general. Without any advertising wastage, we were able to quickly gain meaningful insights into our target audience and their behaviors with the AdDefend campaign, which eventually helped us to save money in the long term. The AdDefend campaign has paid off for us on multiple levels.

---

What is Panasonic smart home?

Smart home from Panasonic is a monitoring and control system for your home. With smart home you can watch your home during a vacation as well as use the automatic device control – very easy to install and to handle. Using a smartphone or tablet, you can control everything in your own home anywhere at any time. Panasonic products can be combined with an Allianz Assist package. In the event of a damage, an immediate assistance is provided. This combination product was promoted in the Panasonic campaign.