Instagram Ad 2020 - Promoting OTT Viewership and Brand Awareness

SITUATION

Although promoting within your current audience is fun, it’s important to continually grow and promote brand awareness. That’s where this ad comes in.

As public places closed and families spent more time at home, it was important for Kabillion to make families aware that there was a great, free, and child-friendly TV option out there. To make the most effective ad campaign, my team and I had to look at a variety of factors. We knew we wanted to advertise on social media, as social networks are able to target very specific groups of people in ways that other media forms can’t. But in choosing to do so, it affected our ability to target our primary audience. Due to child protection laws, children under 13 are not allowed to use social media, nor can they have cookies to track their web and browsing history, therefore preventing targeted ads being served to them. As Kabillion’s primary target audience is children ages 0-11, we ultimately made a decision to target its secondary target audience, their parents.

DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION

Parents are often (or, more correctly, always) the decision-makers for children, particularly when it comes to their entertainment. Because of this, I needed to make sure that parents understood exactly who and what Kabillion was within a short amount of time. Since Kabillion is a visually based product, I decided to promote on Instagram (and by proxy, Facebook), as it’s one of the most visually based apps out there. To make sure parents could further research the company once they saw the ad, I linked the ad to the Kabillion Roku app download page, where they could immediately download the OTT app. And of course, I had to brainstorm and design what would make parents stop to watch the ad in the first place.

I wanted to make sure that parents could connect with the shows so they would understand that Kabillion is safe for kids. I chose a mixture of Kabillion’s more popular shows, its older and very recognizable shows, and a few newer and exclusive shows. I chose visuals that connected reality to the shows themselves. Once I had the idea, I filmed and edited a rough video draft to get approvals. Once approved, I sent over the draft to our video editor, who refined it to what you see below. The entire decision-making and editing process was done in a 5-day workweek, an amazing feat at the time as we had just started working from home!

RESULTS

The ad ran for a month and ultimately increased Kabillion’s Instagram following by 23%, its website visits increased 300% during the campaign, and it received a 20% viewership increase on its Roku app. The ad was able to reach the target demographic, and received comments every hour, either asking about Kabillion’s programming or making a general positive note. Overall, it was a very successful campaign, and helped grow Kabillion’s brand awareness.