A performance-driven digital strategy.
Bringing the CPA down through an optimised digital media mix.
Continuously optimising an overall media plan, to get the most out of it and bring acquisition costs down.
- Period
- Since 2021
- Services
- Marketing Mix Modeling
- Commerce
- Production banners
- Decoupling
- Client
- Sky Show
- Media plan
- Google search
- Bing search
- Display
- Video
- Programmatic
- Meta
- TikTok ads
- Snapchat ads
Sky Show carries the best HBO series as well as Sky Original productions, exclusively. For film lovers, it offers Hollywood blockbusters with new titles every week, for only CHF 9.90 a month.
We began working with Sky at the start of 2021, when the company wanted to accelerate its growth in German-speaking Switzerland.
Challenge - Generating growth in German-speaking Switzerland while keeping acquisition costs in hand.
Sky wants to grow its German-speaking and English-speaking user base in Switzerland, in particular by marketing its sky show offering. Sky show offers several subscriptions to its SVOD service, giving access to films (The Batman, Spider-Man: No Way Home, 007 No Time to Die and others) and hit series (Game of Thrones, House of the Dragon, And Just Like That, Euphoria and others) as well as original productions (Tschugger, Gomorra, Britannia and others).
The aim is to make the breadth of the platform known, along with everything new on it — a catalogue that grows every week with successful content — by putting forward the attractive welcome offer of a 7-day free trial. For Bright, the challenge lies in building a performance acquisition strategy that maximises new subscribers for each piece of content in the catalogue, through an effective method of producing creative assets, able to keep up with a crowded editorial calendar.
Strategy
We audited and took over every digital advertising platform then in place — Meta, Google search, Display, Video, Programmatic — completed the digital coverage with further media — Bing search, TikTok ads, Snapchat ads — and deployed our data-driven performance acquisition method.
- Audit of the existing channels and configurations, and assessment of the data available
- Mapping of the conversion funnels and analysis of the conversion rate at each step
- Control, monitoring and improvement of data collection and reconciliation
- Continuous adjustment of media planning against the objectives and the results
- Launch of new tests, new messaging and new visuals
- Recommendation of new tools that will improve effectiveness, automation and results
- Challenging the KPIs and adapting the active media, nimbly
To illustrate each announcement, we built a mechanised process for producing creative assets, which we call decoupling. It lets us build a series of “creative masters” on different themes — news, event, promotion and so on — and then size them to the flow of content in Sky’s editorial plan. A method that produces hundreds of banners fitted to each piece of content within days, delivering the right message with the best performance.
Those masters are themselves challenged, and evolve with the performance analysis of each version and with Sky Show’s new needs.
In 2024, to assess the whole media plan of the Sky brand in Switzerland (Sky Show and Sky Sport), we ran a Marketing Mix Modeling study, to measure the real impact of the media work, online and offline.
That analysis revealed marked seasonality, tied directly to the high points of influential content — the decisive stages of football matches, or the release of a series with wide recognition. We modelled those variations by building a fervour index, a key tool that let us optimise the media strategy by capitalising on those peaks of engagement.
With that approach, we were able to propose a strategic allocation of investment, getting the most impact out of the campaigns by making the best of those seasonal dynamics.
In concrete terms, the recommendations put in place after the MMM brought overall spend down, brought the CPA down, and raised the volume of conversions.
OOH, YouTube and television carry their effect furthest, Google Search the least
Lag effect of each marketing channel on transactions in German-speaking Switzerland, modelled by a geometric law: the share of one period’s effect carried to the next, in %. Choose a channel, here or on its bar.
Source: data simulated for illustration, Bright; approximate values, read off the original figure · Chart: bright.swiss
At the current level of spend, it is on Google Search that one more franc brings the fewest transactions
Diminishing marginal effect: transactions estimated by the model against each channel’s daily spend with lag effect, in CHF, German-speaking Switzerland. The circle marks the observed average daily spend; the triangle, that spend with lag effect. Choose a channel.
Source: data simulated for illustration, Bright; curves and spend read off the original figure, approximate values · Chart: bright.swiss
Impact
After a year of running the acquisition strategy on the digital channels, the growth is there
Efficient weekly campaign launch processes between Sky and Bright, which produces the visuals, so that everyone’s time is well spent
Lessons firmly held, letting us identify the content that performs best and build a valuable base of knowledge for future marketing work.
360%
growth in the volume of conversions.
-43%
in cost per acquisition
+2400
advertising assets created.
