Wireless carrier UScellular wanted to evolve its over-the-top media strategy to reach more local audiences during premium programming. Together with its agency, Harmelin Media, it ran an omnichannel campaign that leveraged TV Quality Index (TVQI) and Harmelin Media’s own Helix solution to help drive greater local household reach and conversions.
Evolving Connected TV strategy with improved content quality and targeting consolidation
Since 1983, UScellular has been providing advanced wireless services to communities outside of major cities, and currently serves 4.5 million customers in 21 states.
The company understands the importance of reaching potential customers on their preferred channels. It’s been running Connected TV (CTV) locally for years, but wanted to expand into high-quality over-the-top (OTT) programming that is popular with their ideal local consumers.
Implementing an omnichannel strategy to help drive reach and conversions
UScellular worked with its agency, Harmelin Media, to build on its previous success by running CTV on our platform — now with an omnichannel strategy, even more precise targeting, and higher inventory quality.
By running all its channels side by side on our platform, the campaign team could use our platform’s frequency controls to help holistically reduce waste and increase reach. UScellular and Harmelin Media also activated our TV Quality Index (TVQI), which allowed them to optimize toward quality content without needing to vet every publisher manually.
Integrating Harmelin Media’s Helix solution with our platform enabled UScellular to target households more precisely. Helix is Harmelin Media’s suite of analytics tools that supports data-driven media planning and measurement. Harmelin Media developed Helix in-house, using a mix of client, syndicated, and third-party data to inform key decisions in its planning process. Helix gives Harmelin Media the ability to seamlessly ingest localized data at scale and pivot strategies on the fly as the market evolves.
Key tools within Helix include:
- GeoViews: An interactive mapping solution that enables Harmelin Media to visually analyze key metrics, isolating and exploring opportunities and gaps in business or market conditions that it can act upon through media.
- MarketMax: Algorithmic clustering (audience and/or geographic) that assesses multiple business drivers and organizes business locations or other data into strategic cohorts, for more precise targeting at scale.
- Sense: A strategic-planning tool that forecasts business impact at a particular spend level and enables scenario planning for optimal investments by cohort, based on adjusting campaign-specific variables to create a change in consumer behavior.
The combination of data analytics and implementation of TVQI within an omnichannel strategy helped the team to deliver a 71% higher conversion rate when using CTV and display, compared to running display alone. Frequency capping enabled the carrier to reach 66% more unique households with the same budget. Auto-applying TVQI optimizations resulted in an 11% improvement in the company’s TVQI score and a 24% reduction in its cost per acquisition.
Following this success, UScellular plans to keep using our platform to run CTV as part of an omnichannel strategy that focuses its upper-funnel media mix on engaging, high-quality video inventory.
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