Meet Luis Constantino, Creative Director at Media Contacts, who shares insights into the ground-breaking Citroen AirCross campaign launched in Brazil. The campaign lets the browser navigate a car in a 3D environment over hundreds of web pages. When the user stops, they can click-thru to browse the site where the car lands.

What is your favorite brand experience?
There is a campaign that was very special from the first moment we created the strategic planning, the concept and the media planning up to the execution of the ad. I am referring to the launch of the Citroën AirCross in Brazil.

What was the brief for the Citroën campaign?
The Citroën AirCross launch campaign was very daring for Citroën in Brazil. Although the car has a bold and groundbreaking design, this model represented the introduction of a new category of car that the brand had never launched before in the country. The slogan of the Citroën AirCross campaign is “New Choices, New Ways”. It represents all the innovation the car carries and also the possibility of choice available to the consumer in this category. The digital strategy was to apply this concept of innovation and novelty in the communication, so we enhanced the concept of “New Choices, New Ways” to “New Formats.”

How was this particular format chosen for the campaign?
The supporting pillar of the whole campaign was the creation of new ad formats and new ways to communicate as well as the interaction with the consumer. The solution for this ad was to create a new format for the IG website. This ad format had never been seen before and represented a new way the user can browse the website.

How did you come up with the creative idea?
The idea of this ad came up when we felt the necessity to communicate the most important accessory of the car: the integrated GPS into the car dashboard. So, we created a new way to browse the website: guided by the integrated GPS, the user ‘drove’ by the website sections on the dashboard of the car.

What feedback/results have you received?
The ad generated such a unique experience that it generated significant media buzz. The ad embodied the whole communication strategy and contributed to surpassing the sales goal of the model by 45%.

What is your idea about the perfect working day?
I believe a perfect working day , in general, is when we are able to balance our duties with our personal needs. In fact, each working day has its pinch of perfection. It can be the day you have a breakthrough idea, the day your client was delighted with your presentation or even when you have a challenging briefing. Simple things can make your day special.

When does your muse visit you?
Each advertiser, especially the ones who work with creation and planning, needs to provide ourselves with lots of information to make the creative process easier: books, arts, movies, newspapers and even advertising are our daily meals. However, if I had to sum up inspiration in a single word, it would be PEOPLE. A simple talk with friends, a family lunch, walking on the street or travel to somewhere are all examples of great sources of inspiration.


How did you start working in digital advertising?
Although nowadays I do not consider myself a “digital advertising professional” anymore, because advertising, in a sense, becomes more and more convergent each day, I have been working with digital for ten years. In the year 2000, I left the design product world to migrate towards and focus my efforts on this market, living the ups and downs of that time, but totally fascinated and more fascinated day after day.

Yes is the first 4G Mobile Internet with Voice service in Malaysia powered by YTL Communications Sdn
Bhd (YTLC). From conception to execution, YTLC was determined to reach out with the message, “Amazing things happen when you say YES!”- which became the campaign’s tagline.  With creative and media partners, Agenda and Carat, respectively, YTLC pre-launched Yes with a massive online rich media campaign powered by MediaMind.

The campaign kicked off with an emotive one- day “Levitator” homepage takeover that succeeded in creating awareness of the new service, establishing a strong initial brand presence, and directly driving pre-registrations for Yes.


The Results are In
With its groundbreaking format and clear call to action, this campaign helped generate the big bang branding YTLC was looking for, and at the same time, build strong awareness of its unique selling propositions that were an innovative way broadband services were traditionally offered in Malaysia. 

• - YTLC managed to reach out to the Malaysian internet audience with an impressive 13.39% (vs. 8.32% benchmark) of users intentionally interacting with their ad. In addition, users were engaged or dwelled with the brand for 73 seconds on average – that is 1.6 times longer than the average Malaysian Dwell Duration of 38.95 sec.
• - Users were drawn to the initial TV commercial video offering of the Levitator, enticing them

  to find out more on the service from the information sections.

• - The strong branding execution also propelled Click-Through Rates 140% higher than the benchmark of 0.73%, indicating that the Levitator, similar to a mini-site was built successfully with the functional purpose of both converting users, as opposed to merely engaging them with an attractive ad.
• - Significantly, it wasn’t just clicking consumers who arrived at the advertiser site. Approximately 0.79% of non-clicking impressions also resulted in conversions.

Click here to download the full YES Case Study.    

Meet Zachary Sriro from the Illusion Factory for a behind-the-scenes look at a great campaign they recently produced for Katy Perry.

 What was the client brief for the Katy Perry campaign?  

 Creative Artist Agency approached us and asked to create a banner for Katy Perry that announced and sold her tour dates. The main purpose of the banner was for fans to see all the cities and venues that Katy would be performing at and allow the user to purchase tickets straight from the banner to the venue.

How did you come up with the idea?

This was the result of collaboration between Illusion Factory and Creative Artist Agency. We came up with a method to be able to externally edit all information in the ad without ever having to open a Flash file. Creatively, we always try to utilize any elements within the key art for buttons and make it as playful and fun as possible. Katy Perry is very stylized and even though the functionality is deep, our challenge was to maintain and preserve the fun style that Katy is known for. Since the dates and venues often changed at whim, it was easy to use.

 What feedback/results have you received?

 Phenomenal! The response was so great, that additional sponsors wanted to piggy back on the original. This campaign jumpstarted many other similar campaigns from agencies who wanted a similar banner for other artists. For example, we worked on a tour banner for Justin Beiber and we were the first ad shop to pull in from a twitter feed.

 Other exciting upcoming campaigns?

 Stay tuned! Illusion Factory is working on another cool campaign with MediaMind to promote three elite golf courses in San Diego. Using 3D models, we are making a high-def photo real quality game on golf courses where users will have to drive through challenging and fun golf course obstacles. Players will have to avoid golf balls, jump over sand traps and the ad is set to run in late April.

 Your idea about the perfect working day: 

The best working day is when a new technology, platform, or trend presents itself and we are able to use it in a different or unique way.

 Your muse best comes when:  

Basically, when all of the pieces come together. It’s when creative and functionality fuse together into something much greater than ever expected and the client is blown away.

  How did you start working in digital advertising?

I’ve always been an artist and I wanted people to interact with my art. Initially, I started as a Flash developer and programmer and that led to more of a producer/ producing role.  My current role requires one to be versatile and wear many hats. The fact that I can design, program and conceptualize from a user perspective and fuse business, technology, and creative into one product is probably the biggest skill that has allowed me to be a successful producer.

Illusion Factory Team From Left To Right: Vivian, Victoria, Jason, Jasmine, Zach, Derek, James, Joe, Marco, Maxx (Boxer), Martini (Datsun)

Ikon Australia published a ground-breaking press release last week. The release states unequivocally that Ikon will only work with VAST compliant publishers as of April 1st. MediaMind approached Sandra Wee, Digital Director at Ikon, for the story behind their bold move:

What brought you to take this stance in favor of VAST?
With an average of 15% of our TV budget being allocated to digital video strategies, it highlighted the need for robust measurement and data transparency across our digital video buys.
With the digital video market expected to grow significantly this year, it is vital that Ikon has complete visibility around reach and verification that our ads have run. That is why we made the stance to only run with publishers who are VAST compliant from 1st April.

What are the benefits VAST is bringing to the buy side?
From an agency perspective, there are 3 main reasons why VAST is so important:
1. Transparency in reporting metrics across publishers. e.g.,: dwell time, publisher duplication, video completion rate, reach & frequency. Without a standardized ad serving system, measurement differs from publisher to publisher with different methodologies and an inability to measure duplication across a media buy.
2. Frequency capping: Advertisers are reliant on the publisher to perform the due diligence on frequency capping your digital video buy. Ever seen the same TVC 5 times in a 45 min program on catch-up TV? Yes, it’s annoying and VAST means agencies can now control frequency.
3. Reduces creative inefficiencies and costs associated with having to create multiple video creative specifications for different publishers.
Without VAST, agencies are very much in the dark when it comes to measuring the success of digital video and verifying if our ads have run. With an average of 15% of Ikon’s TV budget being allocated to digital video, it is pertinent that we are able to look at our campaign from a holistic view rather than rely on publisher data.

How did publishers respond to your announcement?
We did get some reactions from publishers- all positive and supporting our stance.
You mentioned an April 1st dead line? Why then?Based on the research of our key digital video publishers, we understood their rollout with being VAST compliant and 1st of April was a realistic timeline without too many implications across our client set.

What’s the status of the standards (VAST, VPAID) adoption in Australia and APAC?
Most of the digital video publishers in AU aim to be VAST compliant towards the end of March- April of this year. VPAID is also on the radar but this will come once VAST2.0 is implemented.
We think that the video networks will be leading the market by being the first ones to adopt VPAID over the portals here in AU.

What else can be done as an industry effort to promote adoption?
We think there could potentially be more trade press from the IAB promoting what VAST 2.0 is and the benefits for both advertisers and publishers.


To learn more about MediaMind and VAST 2.0, please visit our website here.