Across most of the country, harsh winter weather imposes pain-inducing events such as snow removal, and seasonal arthritic flare ups. This sends many Americans in search of OTC pain medication. A national retail and pharmacy chain partnered with Clinch to bring real-time relief to these customers when they needed it most.

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Situation

The client was preparing a national campaign to drive customer engagement for one of their most notable OTC pain relief brands and needed a partner who could deliver real-time personalization at scale. Clinch did just that, while generating powerful hyper-local insights around what was, and wasn’t, driving engagement.

Solution

Clinch worked with the retail pharmacy chain to establish creative templates that aligned the pain relief brand’s messages with specified winter weather conditions: cold, snow and rain. Creative variants contained multiple buying incentives that ranged from dollar discounts to BOGO deals.

Driving engagement with real-time relevancy

Clinch’s smart ad server delivered hyper-personalized ad experiences across programmatic display channels. Ads were targeted to audiences that mirrored the retailer’s incredibly rich pool of first-party data, to conquest customers who have previously purchased OTC pain relief products from brands other than the brand featured in the campaign.

• Clinch’s smart ad serving was a core component to the campaign, as manual weather triggering would have been far too complex/labor intensive of a process to scale
• Complex weather logic was established per each region, based on historical weather patterns + perceptions, in addition to real-time conditions (e.g. “cold” weather creatives in NYC were triggered by temps dropping below 35 degrees F, compared to temps below 60 degrees F in LA)
• Weather logic changed per month, as baseline temp averages were forecasted to rise toward the end of the flight

Results

Clinch produced 23 creative variations for cold, snow, and rain conditions that featured various buying incentives. The relevancy of weather paired with the right dynamic creative components sparked a lift in consumer engagement throughout the three month flight:

• Ads were served dynamically in real-time, in all 50 US states, based on weather conditions and temperatures
• Rain-triggered creatives garnered the highest engagement with a 75% CTR increase
• Top engaged regions included Virginia, California and New York

CREATIVE INSIGHTS - MOST ENGAGED US STATES​