Challenge

Bosch intended to run a multi-media activation across their focus countries: Thailand, Indonesia, and Malaysia. There were two categories of goals, reflecting the different phases of the activation:

• To build awareness for their two key business units: home appliances and power tools
• To facilitate consideration for their categories driving quality traffic to e-commerce marketplaces

However, there were a combination of challenges to overcome:

• Capturing attention time: Competing for attention real-estate in an overtly crowded and expensive media landscape.
• Moving beyond the walled gardens: Finding in-market audiences beyond the regular social and video giants like Meta and YouTube.
• Ad relevancy: Identifying audiences in a state of relaxed on-screen consumption where they are more receptive to relevant recommendations and exploring those further.

Solution

Based on the insights we gleaned, we developed an "on-hold marketing" strategy, tapping on Grab as a mobile-first platform that users actively engage with before, during, and after transit time, to ensure ad relevancy and capture quality traffic.

Thailand, Indonesia, and Vietnam suffer from some of the worst traffic congestions across Southeast Asia, with people spending on average 66 minutes per day stuck in traffic. In Thailand, which is the worst affected, people can spend up to 192 hours per year in traffic.

In addition to the robust growth in adoption of ride-hailing services within this region, people were stuck in traffic with idle time on their hands, spent locked in on their mobile screens. This provided a unique opportunity to capitalise on this precious time by engaging customers through "on-hold marketing". As we learn more about in-transit idle time, we explored people's behavioural patterns to occupy this time. There were 3 prominent habits; talking on the phone, watching a TV show or playing a game, and lastly scrolling/shopping for food or other consumer goods.

We finalised on developing on-hold marketing idle time. Our next step was to identify a mobile first platform has a user actively engaged before, during and after transit time.

Grab rose as a front contender with a robust presence and market share in our three focus countries. Another unique value-add of Grab was that it also enabled an idle-time customer habit of scrolling/shopping for food or other consumer goods on the app itself. Grab provided the most conducive environment that acknowledged all 3 challenges. Providing a pool of in-market audience with previous purchases from Bosch-related product categories, ensuring we provide relevant content for this audience's attention during their relaxed viewing time in-transit, amplifying their chances to engage with our creative.

The first 3 months of the campaign tapped into social and video platforms to build brand equity and make Bosch highly discoverable. Grab was launched in the second phase of the activation for a 4-month period in Thailand, Indonesia, and Vietnam. Each market promoted 2 different product categories. Each category had a mix of video and static creatives, video showcasing product usage and benefit while static banners provided a commerce call-out aiding intent to purchase.

We were strategic with our ad placements, looking at prime in-app positions discoverable both before and during a customer’s journey:

• Home feed page: User's 1st point of visibility in Grab app
• Transport in-transit page: User's 2nd point while waiting for arrival of ride
• Food and mart in-transit pages: Additional touch points during ride, when a user participates in 'idle time' patterns of ordering food, groceries, or other consumer goods

In addition, we actively targeted a multi-layed audience segment to ensure ad relevancy:

• In-market: Customers actively looking for consumer goods or power tools
• Affinity: Customers who have previously engaged with retail brands, financial services. Apart from engagement, they have also previously purchased via Mart for a significant value.
• High-value transport users and high-income users

Results

The campaign was incredibly successful in generating quality traffic for Bosch's product categories. Our results went well beyond planned benchmarks. The entire activation reached 23 million consumers across three markets, generated 391K clicks, at a 43% lower buy rate.

We also saw a significant uptick in video completion rate, validating our approach of building ad relevancy during idle time in-transit, with an increase of up to 14% above benchmarks in video completion rate in one of the countries.