The power of display provides new insight to wider marketing strategy for The Financial Times

The Challenge

To maximize engagement and drive subscriptions of their online service, the Financial Times (FT) wanted us to use Display & Video 360 (DV360) and Campaign Manager (CM) to establish the optimal theme of the FT’s offering for each of their key audience groups – ‘professional readers’, ‘objective deep divers’ and ‘opinionated newshound’ – in over 150 countries.

The FT offers a unique challenge when it comes to creative messaging, as to maintain relevance it needs to keep up with an ever-changing news cycle. We therefore not only needed a solution that could tailor creative to key audience groups but that could also be easily updated.

How we helped

A dynamic creative feed was proposed to generate relevant creatives in an ever-changing news cycle. The creative itself was then developed around the core product areas of the FT: political, geographic Brexit coverage, financial and British domestic and social politics.

Audience profiles were further split out to offer even more detailed insights. To maximize bidding performance and prevent a complex account structure, dynamic targeting keys in Campaign Manager allowed creative to be automatically tailored to the audience that was being served the ad.

The weighting of the creative was optimized to favor those with higher engagement, becoming increasingly personalized to the audience as the campaign progressed and more data was gathered.