YouTube Director Mix enables the scalable, tailor-made creation and personalized playout of video ads – the best way to cover all the bases in a heterogeneous audience’s user journey. Google’s new tool is therefore an important part of CSS Insurance’s fall 2020 marketing campaign, a co-creation between Webrepublic, the Notch – Member of Publicis creative agency and CSS itself. The outstanding results show that video ads are well suited to reaching performance goals.

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Project overview

Initial Position

Fall is the most important season of the year for health insurers. At the end of September, insurers publish next year’s premiums. The public then has until the end of November to change their insurance provider. This creates a highly competitive market where insurers need to get as many new customers as possible, as quickly as possible. Premiums also differ from canton to canton, adding an additional complication. 

Advertising campaigns that have a high relevance for users and that are applicable to different situations are what is most sought after – and exactly what YouTube Director Mix makes possible. Google’s new tool allows advertisers to create tailor-made videos, enabling ads relevant to the environment, interests, or goals of target groups. One video serves as the foundation that advertisers can add elements to – such as pictures, prices or language. These elements can be defined separately for each targeting criteria; the Director Mix subsequently brings these together automatically. By thus eliminating a great deal of time-consuming production work, you can draft many different variants of a single video with relatively little effort. After this, the videos are created automatically with their campaign details – budget, running time, targeting, etc. – in Google Ads.

  • Sector:Insurances

Goals

The fall marketing campaign’s ultimate goal is to win new customers. As interactions with CSS Insurance’s online channels increase, more potential customers will use CSS’s online premium calculator and request a quote – or immediately apply for an insurance plan on the website. In order to make that happen, different channels require different processes. One of these is playing video ads made with the Director Mix on YouTube. This has the following goals:

  • Increase traffic to the website
  • Increase the online visibility of the campaign
  • Generate leads
“We are proud to be the first in Switzerland to use the Director Mix. The campaign’s outstanding results have confirmed the value of this innovative and adventurous approach to us.”

Sebastian Schönbächler

Online Marketing Manager at CSS Insurance

Measures

CSS Insurance’s target audience is starkly fragmented. To appeal to them individually, the campaign team for display and video ads decided to use a highly complex, personalized and data-driven setup and therefore relied on the YouTube Director Mix tool in all phases of the campaign:

  • Video ads (motion design, based on display banners) in a performance marketing campaign with a location-based, granular setup for targeted appeal 
  • Video ads with 250 variations (the limit defined by Google) for individualized targeting based on geographic criteria or by remarketing, for example

 

Video Ad CSS fall campaign

Example of a video ad on YouTube from the CSS fall campaign with individualized targeting.

Video Ad Zurich CSS fall campaign

Example of a video ad on YouTube with geo-specific targeting.

Results

  • 21% of the digital marketing campaign’s total traffic was generated from YouTube, while only 12% of the campaign budget was spent on this.
  • Video ads on YouTube generated 17% of the digital marketing campaign’s total clicks.
  • The videos were viewed 6.5 million times (for at least seven seconds) on YouTube, boosting the campaign’s general performance. 

Adding personalized video ads to the digital marketing mix allowed us to cover the entire user journey seamlessly. The ads show outstanding results and are ideally suited for performance marketing processes.

“The Director Mix tool allows us to apply a concept from display advertising – targeting users in a location-based and granular way – to YouTube as well, thus markedly improving the performance of the campaign.”

Webrepublic AG

“The Director Mix is the ideal tool to create, promote and analyze videos for different target audiences, languages and locations quickly and easily. The constant interchange of text, creatives and voice-over make it possible to change the creatives quickly and at scale in order to respond more precisely to customer needs.”

Moritz Liebergesell

Moritz Liebergesell, Google Senior Agency Account Manager Switzerland

The CSS fall campaign won these awards at the Best of Swiss Web 2021 and the Effie Awards Switzerland 2022.