Rogers NHL GameCentre Live is the first brand globally to use a new real-time rich media ad unit from Google‘s ad innovations team.
The new ads, which launched Oct. 26, are built around big plays during the game. When a goal is scored, Rogers fires off a round of ads across the web with a video clip from its online stream.
The ads are programmatically targeted at NHL fans using Google’s trove of search and behaviour data, with a call-to-action telling them to check out Rogers GameCentre Live online streaming service so they won’t miss out on any of the action. Rogers has promised to stream all 1,000 games of the NHL regular season on desktop and mobile via the service, which costs $199 and is free for Rogers subscribers.
Alexis Cox, who leads Google’s Art, Copy and Code team out of Mountainview, Calif., said it’s the first time a brand has used their technology to dynamically insert video into an ad and deliver it to an audience online in near-real-time.
“This is a global first for this application. We wanted to partner with someone like Rogers to figure out how might we blend unique, engaging creative with programmatic,” she said.
The same Google team worked on Nike’s “Phenomenal Shot” campaign earlier this year during the World Cup, which used display and mobile ads that were dynamically created during matches. Cox said the team has become fascinated by the amount of engagement that key moments in live sports games can drive, particularly on mobile, and wanted to see where else they could take the technology.
According to Rogers SVP of brand Livia Zufferli, the GameCentre campaign prioritizes fans that follow teams based outside their home market, which make up a big part of GameCentre Live’s subscriber base. “If you cheer for an NHL team that’s not in your resident location, GameCentre Live is a perfect offering for you, because you get access to all the games that are playing, even out-of-market,” she said.
Rogers is able to identify those fans using Google’s trove of search and behavioural data, along with its its programmatic buying platform, DoubleClick Bid Manager, to find opportunities to reach them with rich media ads across the web.
“We want to understand how this will work and see a lot of possibility for it in the future, but of course we’ll be treating this as a bit of test and learn and optimizing as we go,” Zufferli said.
Cox said the Rogers campaign is a good example of an advertiser using programmatic to drive top-of-funnel brand objectives.
“Traditionally programmatic has been used in direct response campaigns with highly data-centric conversion goals,” said Cox. “But when your conversion goals are to raise general awareness, oftentimes the groups using programmatic and the groups who are responsible for building creative for awareness campaigns aren’t completely synced. So this program is also an effort to showcase how those two sometimes opposing forces can be intricately linked in a branding program.”
Zufferli said Rogers would be assessing the success of the campaign based mainly on engagement metrics. “We’ll be looking at are we getting at the right types of consumers we’re trying to target, and ultimately we’ll be measuring the impact on interest and consideration of Rogers GameCentre Live,” she said.
