YOOX: Case study

Credits & Description:

Brand YOOX
Entrant STINK STUDIOS LONDON
STINK STUDIOS London, United Kingdom Entrant Company
STINK STUDIOS London, United Kingdom Idea Creation
GOOGLE Milan, Italy Idea Creation
STINK STUDIOS London, United Kingdom Production
GOOGLE Milan, Italy Media Placement
YOOX Milan, Italy Additional Company
Giulia Chantal Lisot YOOX Net-A-Porter Group Senior Media Strategy & Planning Specialist YOOX, Off Season
Antonio Tardio YOOX Net-A-Porter Group Art Director Team Leader YOOX, Off Season
Andreas Mielenhausen Google ZOO Creative Lead
Luiz Risi Google ZOO Creative Lead
Giorgio Ferretti Google ZOO Creative Business Partner
Alessandro Gaudenzi Google Industry Manager Fashion & Retail
Marco Saggio Google Product & Solutions Specialist
Alberto Faver Google Customer Solutions Engineer
Federica Uccella Google Account Manager
Paloma Cutillas Clemente Google ZOO Production Lead
Lauren Bryan Google ZOO Head of Production
Mailine Swildens Google ZOO Director
Stink Studios Stink Studios Production Company
Peter Tarka Peter Tarka Illustrator
Javier Vallejo García JVG Animator
Russ Chimes Studio Uno Mas Composer and Sound Designer

Synopsis
YOOX is the world’s leading lifestyle online store for fashion and design. YOOX believes that fashion is timeless and that past collections have value. YOOX isn’t famous for discounts.
We needed to introduce the brand and its values to fashion lovers around the world, making them value past collections as much as YOOX does.
Objectives:
- Reach new customers in the 4 key markets: US, Italy, Japan, Korea.
- Increase brand awareness and interest.
- Differentiate YOOX from other online fashion stores.
- Test YouTube as a direct sales channel.
Strategy
According to a recent study, 76% of people skip ads as an ingrained habit.
To change this habit and increase the odds of selling, we needed to offer people relevant products.
Since we had no data on potential customers, we used Google Search data to find the most desired products in each market.
Consumers were targeted by demographics (men-women/25-54), affinities (shoppers, fashionistas, bargain hunters), in-market for apparel & accessories. We used the user’s search history to deliver the right video to the right person.
Ads were served programmatically over TrueView for Action, a skippable pre-roll ad with the benefits of a customizable call-to-action button.
There were 3 calls-to-action in each film:
“Skip it and you’ll miss it”, in the beginning.
“Be faster next time”, at the end.
"SHOP NOW”, as a button
The resulting mechanics gamified the user experience, transforming a media format into a new e-commerce tool.
Relevancy
The Most Exclusive Collection was conceived to generate 2 direct responses from viewers: not skipping the ad (for the general population) and buying the featured product on the spot (for impulse buyers).
More than the desired outcome, a direct response was an intrinsic part of the campaign’s success. Without it, we would not have been able to present the brand message to such a large audience, nor generate sales among the most engaged viewers.
Films were served on TrueView for Action, a format that combines the features of normal skippable pre-roll ads with the benefits of a customisable call-to-action button.
Outcome
Achieved all desired responses: reduced skip rate, increased watch time and sales.
Over 51.000.000 impressions.
19.000.000 complete views.
Non-skip rate 23% higher than global benchmarks.
Average watch time: 14.5 seconds.
14.7 million unique users reached.
310.000 people clicked to the website.
1715 luxury items sold.
266.430,35 Euros worth of merchandise sold.
Impressions above target: 18% Italy, 22% Japan, 40% Korea.*
Views above target: 42% Italy, 23% Japan, 13% Korea, 12.5% US.
The campaign was so effective, it was limited by daily budget every day.
Average cost per view of just 0.02 Euros.
CPV below target: -35% Italy, -21% Japan, -17% Korea, -12% US.
Ad recall lift: 32.3% Italy, 17.2% US.*
Purchase intent lift: 17.2% Italy, 13.4% Japan, 8.4% Korea.*
Brand interest lift: 97% US, 71% Japan.*
*Other countries were not measured.
Execution
The implementation of the campaign relied on an coordinated effort around the data available to each stakeholder. Google data was used to choose the most relevant products for each country. YOOX un-deeplinked the selected products from its website and put them on a separate data feed.
Our proprietary video rendering platform generated, tagged and uploaded the hundreds of individual videos directly to YOOX’s YouTube channel overnight.
Placements were defined programmatically, using all available tools, including search history match (Custom Intents). A custom script allowed live stock data to manage the campaign (a world’s first), removing videos as products were sold.
The Most Exclusive Collection had almost 400 individual ads, in 4 different languages. The ads were seen by millions of people globally and generated hundreds of thousands Euros in sales.
Campaign Description
Transform past collections into The Most Exclusive Collection. We removed the most desired items from YOOX.com and made them available only through skippable pre-roll ads. The catch? You had just one shot at getting each product. Skip the ad and you can kiss that item goodbye. Forever.
To achieve that, we had to make sure we could:
a. Offer new customers products they actually wanted (though we had no data on them).
b. Create hundreds of videos, each with a different product.
c. Deliver the right video to the right person programmatically on a global scale.
d. Guarantee the same ad would not be served twice to the same person.
e. Manage the campaign in real time, so sold out products weren’t shown accidentally.