London Town contextual marketing

with

We love
London Town

Beefeater London Town is a festival of London’s food, culture and music, with DJs, bands and vintage shopping. Beefeater’s goal was to raise brand advocacy by bringing the best of London culture to Madrid, Seville and Barcelona.

We were asked to devise a data-driven creative strategy to increase visibility, communicate event information and bring in festival-goers – all while staying within strict restrictions on alcohol marketing.

In partnership with the agency La Despensa and media company GroupM, we created a dynamic online campaign involving hundreds of targeted, tailored messages.

The joy of six

Beefeater asked us to convey six key messages. These were based around the four event spaces (music, culture, food and the market), generic information about the festival, and the benefits of the Premium Pass, which visitors could sign up to in advance.

To build up excitement and anticipation in the run-up to the event, the team also created a countdown banner, which was pushed to half the ad impressions.

Hitting the
right target

Google has strict restrictions around alcohol marketing. It’s not possible for alcohol brands to access affinity segments, for example. But, as Orson Welles said, the enemy of art is the absence of limitations, and these restrictions inspired some creative strategic thinking.

Contextual targeting

The ads ran on four site categories, with the six messages tailored to each one. This meant there were 24 message permutations.

Dayparting, Geo-targeting &
In-Market targeting

Motion graphic of a rising sun for Beefeater's Data Driven campaign

Using dayparting, we devised different messages for different times of day. In the mornings, for example, you could find out what was happening in the market place, about food and culture, and what events were on. And then in the evenings it was all about the music.

Motion graphic map for Beefeater in-market targeting campaign

We also teamed up with the travel sites eDreams, Minube and Tripadvisor, to reach people travelling to the event from around the country.

Motion graphic map with highlighted cities for Beefeater geo location campaign

The team use geo-targeting to reach people in the host city.

This time it
was personal

The dynamic feed was populated with 110 message permutations in two formats – so a total of 220 unique ads. To find out whether this dynamic approach to messaging was working, we carried out some A/B testing.

We set a control sample, pushing a non-dynamic, one-for-all message to 5% of the impressions. This way we could compare the results of the dynamic framework within the same campaign.

And the result?

The dynamic campaign was a clear winner, with a click-through rate of 0.10% compared with 0.03% for the static campaign. We were also rather pleased to discover that click-through for our London Town campaign as a whole was 0.10%, beating the average Beefeater campaign for 2017 (0.03%).