Title	BRINGING ENTERTAINMENT HOME
Brand	WARNER BROS. UK
Product/Service	HOME ENTERTAINMENT
Category	G06. Breakthrough on a Budget
Entrant	PHD London, UNITED KINGDOM
Idea Creation	PHD London, UNITED KINGDOM
Media Placement	PHD London, UNITED KINGDOM
Production	AMAZON London, UNITED KINGDOM
Additional Company	WARNER BROS. ENTERTAINMENT London, UNITED KINGDOM

Name	Company	Position
Nick Pointing	PHD UK	Business Director
Rob Thomas	PHD UK	Digital Business Director
Eleanor Hill	PHD UK	Digital Group Manager
Georgina Raymond	PHD UK	Digital Account Director
Amy Hardman	PHD UK	Digital Account Director
Sebastian Ellison	PHD UK	Digital Planner
Paula Kiernozycka	PHD UK	Social Account Manager
Aneesha Pomerenke	PHD UK	Senior Social Planner Buyer
Haider Naqvi	PHD UK	Programmatic Account Manager
Tom O'Brien	PHD UK	AV Account Director
Sarah Nugent	PHD UK	Managing Partner
Alex Leonard	PHD UK	PPC Account Manager
Katarzyna Bednarska	PHD UK	PPC Planner
Daphne Tsouvala	PHD UK	PPC Account Manager
Jeremy Gurran	PHD UK	Data Planning Director
Ed Rowlands	Amazon	Team Lead for Movies
Silvia Agresta	Amazon	Strategic Account Manager
Viola De Girolami	Warner Bros. UK	Head of Digital
Danni Murray	Warner Bros. UK	Vice President – Media, Digital & Marketing Partnerships
Henry Reed	Warner Bros. UK	Digital Media Manager
Colin Thomas	Warner Bros. UK	Executive Director of Digital Sales
Carla Bell	Warner Bros. UK	Senior Marketing Manager
Saffron Douglas	PHD UK	Senior Marketing Manager
Alice Dean	Warner Bros. UK	Senior Marketing Manager
Martin Gough	Warner Bros. UK	Deputy Marketing Director

Why is this work relevant for Media?

It used an innovative source of live audience data to deliver a media strategy that created incremental revenue for Warner Bros at a time where its theatrical business was being decimated.

Background

As the UK went into lockdown, cinemas were one of the first places to close. For the first time in cinematic history, there were no box office takings for the major studios. At the same time, there was an uptick in the viewing of subscription VOD platforms making it easier to access thousands of hours of content. Warner Bros. needed to find new ways to capitalize on the VOD consumption increase whilst also filling the theatrical revenue gap. WB has a vast back catalogue of film/TV titles, which represented a great opportunity for people seeking both new and old content to watch during lockdown. With Disney+, Amazon, Netflix, SKY, the BBC, and ITV spending a combined £155m on paid media promoting their content, Warner Bros. wasn’t going to be able to outspend the competition. So, we focused our efforts on competing with our media brains, not our media budgets.

Describe the creative idea / insights (30% of vote)

How we CREATED the insights We put our entire focus on driving sales of WB catalogue titles in a format known as Electronic Sell Through (EST) – the purchase of a permanent, digital-only version (we weren’t chasing rentals or downloads of content that was available for ‘free’ as part of a subscription). To do this, we did something no UK advertiser has ever done before. We partnered with Amazon to derive audience insights DIRECTLY from its Prime Video viewing data to create a first-of-its-kind targeting approach. This data allowed us to create target audience segments based on ACTUAL near-live lockdown digital viewing behaviours and target them across Amazon’s ad inventory, Google, and other social platforms.

Describe the strategy (20% of vote)

Our strategy was simple to explain but complex to execute. We’d create a home entertainment campaign that changed the Warner Bros content that was featured in real-time to reflect lockdown VOD viewing habits of UK audiences. In addition, as our partnership allowed us to pull creative assets directly through from Amazon product pages, we could also quickly flex the products featured to reflect cultural news in the wider world (more of that in the next section). In short, we had complete targeting and product flexibility. For no additional creative cost. This creative flexibility also allowed us to optimize in real-time and change the movies featured based on insights from our data dashboard - expanding the reach of successful titles/genres and quickly replacing those that were under-performing (we wouldn’t get everything right the first time).

Describe the execution (20% of vote)

Identifying macro trends like the surge in binge-watching longer series leading us to push franchises like The Hobbit and Harry Potter, whilst more macro indicators led to our actions such as promoting John Wick 2 to help action movie fans bridge the gap between John Wick (newly available and proving popular on VOD services) and John Wick 3 (which was premiering on SKY). When big entertainment stories broke, we could also immediately activate ads for contextually relevant titles, e.g. we activated ads for the existing Matrix trilogy the moment that the halting of filming on the 4th Matrix installment made news headlines. Throughout the campaign, our data dashboard allowed us to determine which titles impacted revenue most positively - minimising discounting, maximizing margin and leading to the majority of sales being made at full retail price.

List the results (30% of vote)

We delivered Warner Bros. £9.87 Return On Advertising Spend for every £1 we spent ALL of this revenue was incremental to the business Not only did the campaign deliver new revenue, but it has also helped grow the EST format market as a whole (it rose 20% in H1 2020), bringing first-time buyers into the category against whom we delivered a ROAS of £20.64 per £1 spent. In fact, from the campaign’s success has stimulated new - previously unplanned – media spend with this new approach being applied as a 7-figure ‘Always On’ budget all year round.