How a Performance TV B2B Campaign Shattered Ryan Reynolds’ Confidence While Driving Over 23% of Total Site Traffic

As a B2B brand ourselves, we were all too familiar with the limitations B2B marketers encounter while trying to effectively engage their audience. That’s a major reason why Performance TV is designed the way it is; it allows you to target the exact viewers you want to reach in a number of ways, then deliver highly engaging, non-skippable ads on the biggest screen in the house. 

We decided to use Performance TV to cut through the clutter of the usual B2B marketing mix and grab viewers’ attention—all while generating strong site traffic and awareness (more on that later).

Our B2B marketing strategy includes finding new audiences as well as nurturing existing prospects. We wanted to reach valuable users across our entire sales funnel, so we deployed three campaigns —prospecting, retargeting, and an ABM campaign that targeted users found in our CRM. 

For the prospecting campaign, we used the fully integrated Oracle Data Cloud to select in-market B2B audiences who worked in marketing. For retargeting, we used Performance TV’s audience builder to segment our site traffic into users who showed high intent, like visiting multiple pages on our site. And for our ABM campaign, Performance TV lets you import email lists so those users can be targeted with television ads, so we simply uploaded our email list into the platform. It then matched those emails to Connected TV audience targeting data, allowing us to reach those users with streaming TV ads. 

We then set a budget and goal. Since Performance TV is all about driving outcome-based metrics, we didn’t settle for a reach or impression goal. Instead, we selected site visits as the goal which would help us determine whether our budget was well-spent.

With targeting and budget settled, we turned our attention to ad creative. Performance TV comes equipped with an A/B testing tool, which allows you to pit two ads against one another to see which one performs best. To take full advantage of this capability, we developed two different ads featuring our CCO Ryan Reynolds. 

One ad featured Reynolds on camera directly addressing the targeted audience of marketers. The other only used his voice-over. We naturally assumed the spot with him on-camera would outperform the other (A-list talent should bring A-list results, right?). But surprisingly, that wasn’t the case. Our creative testing showed the Ryan-less ad soundly defeated the one featuring him on-camera—generating a Verified Visit rate that was 3X higher. This was news he did not take well.

Important lesson to be learned: leave your assumptions at the door and always test your ad creative. 

As the campaign continued, Performance TV’s automated media buying optimized bidding and placements thousands of times per day in order to reach the targeted audience in the most effective and cost-efficient way possible. This ensured we would reach the right viewers at the right time, place, and price to maximize the return on our ad spend.

The campaigns were a smash success. Since Performance TV is fully measurable in Google Analytics, we examined the campaigns’ impact on total site traffic—and were blown away by what we found. They were responsible for generating over 23% of MNTN’s total monthly website traffic.

Not only that, they proved highly effective at reaching qualified viewers and driving them down the sales funnel. The Performance TV campaigns generated a greater share of monthly conversions (16.49%) than our Google paid search campaigns (15.46%). This is impressive because paid search captures existing demand, while Performance TV had to generate it first, then capture it—and yet it still delivered more conversions. 

Other blended campaign performance metrics were strong as well. They generated a 3.25% Verified Visit rate, at only a $0.02 cost per completed view. That said, each campaign did well in its own right; our retargeting and prospecting campaigns both drove strong visit rates and conversions. Our ABM campaign did its part warming leads, and touched 45% of the deals closed in the month of the campaign.

A/B testing our ad creative proved to be invaluable because it revealed our assumptions were wrong. This directly benefited the campaign’s success; the Ryan-less version was responsible for 75% of the campaign’s total Verified Visits. Without testing the two versions against one another, we would have never realized the higher performing ad was the one we least suspected.