Title	THE BANNER THAT MAKES YOU LIKE BANNERS
Brand	3M
Product/Service	POST-IT® STICKY NOTES
Category	A02. Creative Innovation (incl. business solutions in association with a brand or creative campaign)
Entrant Company	BBDO RUSSIA GROUP Moscow, RUSSIA
Advertising Agency	BBDO RUSSIA GROUP Moscow, RUSSIA

Name	Company	Position
Andrew Kontra	Bbdo Russia Group	Creative Director
Mihai Coliban	Bbdo Russia Group	Creative Director
Polina Zabrodskaya	Bbdo Russia Group	Senior Copywriter
Anna Migaleva	Bbdo Russia Group	Senior Copywriter
Fernando Muto	Bbdo Russia Group	Senior Art Director
Mikhail Vdovin	Bbdo Russia Group	Business Development Director
Alexander Makarovsky	Bbdo Russia Group	Digital Director
Polina Zvereva	Bbdo Russia Group	Senior Account Manager
Alexey Zinchenko	Indee Interactive	Producer
Egor Bernikov	Indee Interactive	Ui Designer
Arina Vernidub	Indee Interactive	Coder
Andrey Zakurdaev	Indee Interactive	Coder
Oleg Nikanorov	Indee Interactive	Coder
Sergey Smolentsev	3m	Marketing Supervisor
Yulia Smirnova	3m	Marketing Coordinator

The Brief

Retargeting technology was originally developed to help marketers better target prospective consumers and close the deals. But the reality is different. Internet users are frequently chased around the web by shoes, blenders, hotel rooms and other items they only looked at once. It’s irritating for people, who consequently frequently block banners, turning banners into nearly useless tools for brands. We figured we could actually use the weakness of this technology as a strength. If the same banner can come up again and again, why not give it a purpose that could actually help the end user? Why not make it… a Post-it® note? The Idea: We created a Post-it® note banner which allowed people to use retargeting for jotting down info that might be useful later. How it works: Write your notes inside the banner on our website and just continue browsing. You will start seeing your notes instead of retargeting banners. Technology: It seems like it’s an ad-blocking software, but it’s not. The banner uses the same retargeting technology online shops use to hunt you down and show you different products. We bought a bunch of placements on the most visited Russian websites, so that users could meet their notes wherever they went. Mechanics: First, we partnered with the biggest online portals in Russia (gazeta.ru, rambler.ru, championat.ru) to create rich-media banners that allowed users create their own notes. A click on any note brought users to the Post-it® webpage where they could add more notes, manage or delete them all. Second, we partnered with retargeting banner networks, such as AdLabs, to follow users with retargeting banners on more than 20 000 Russian web-sites. When the user landed on one of those sites, we automatically tracked her by using cookies and showed her personal notes in a banner.

Our innovation changed the approach to what is already traditional online media – retargeting banners. Instead of just bombarding users with reminders of what they were interested in, we gave them control over what they see online. For Post-it, it was a great opportunity to impact this change of user experience, as the idea of “saving your thought for later” is embedded into the very essence of the brand. We used the same retargeting technology that had been in place for ages. However, we decided to use it in a more meaningful way by letting consumers generate their own banners, as Post-it® notes banners, instead of blocking banners completely. The Post-it innovation is not culturally linked to a specific problem or to the context of online media in Russia. We believe it is a global idea that changed (and may do that in the future, in case it becomes a regular marketing action from Post-it or it will be adopted by other brands) the way retargeting banners are perceived worldwide, creating a completely new user experience.

The idea can be used by any brand actually but the banner format fits better the very concept of Post-it notes. There is no request to further develop or scale the idea. The innovation is revolutionary for online media, as I turns retargeting banners – passive format, to which users are less receptive – into a playground for interaction, allowing users to be in control of a piece of online content that traditionally they would have no influence on. Active Engagement - 47,6%, 1300% higher than that for an average interactive banner in Russia and 58% better than the previous highest result, as stated by the banner network we used. Average Interaction Time - 152.40 seconds, 214% longer than the best practices on the market. 97% of the users chose to see their retargeting banners throughout several weeks of the campaign, 39% of them used the website to add more.