The Challenge
Alcoholic beverages are heavily restricted by law across international territories. Products cannot be shown in advertisement creatives, and Legal Drinking Age restrictions (LDA) are a mandatory requirement. These constraints severely restricted how and where the advertiser could show their ads, limiting user reach.
Because of this, all prior advertising efforts were limited to walled gardens and major publishers that exclusively collect and monetize user-age data. This limitation kept costs high and left the vast open internet completely unexplored.
Our Approach
Our team decided to shift the creative strategy completely: we generated dynamic advertisement creatives that convey the brand's purpose rather than the product itself or its specific merits.
To safely scale these creatives on the open internet, we established a manual review and approval workflow for target sites, circumventing the lack of standardized age data on programmatic channels while ensuring strict regulatory compliance.
The Solution
We gathered and reviewed a massive inventory list of the top 80,000 websites by inventory size in the country. We classified these domains based on multiple variables, including:
- Age-related relevance and brand safety
- Household Income (HHI) skew
- Publisher category and fairness
- Compliance track record
These sites were then bucketed into specific advertiser and brand personas. Finally, each brand persona on the sitelist was mapped to a generated creative that aligned with that persona without ever explicitly mentioning or displaying the product.
The Results
By leveraging Real-Time Bidding (RTB) and open internet inventory, the brand achieved exceptional performance outcomes:
- Reach Expansion: Opened up audience reach by 20x using open web inventory channels.
- CPM Optimization: Reduced average CPM costs by 22%, allowing the brand to reach far more users per dollar spent.
- Brand Equity: Significantly increased brand recognition and recall rates across all key demographics.
- ROI Lift: Generated a massive improvement in overall campaign sales and return on investment (ROI).
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