When Dr. Oetker, a German multinational specialty baking ingredients producer, engaged GroupM to manage their 2024 Euro Cup brand awareness campaign, their primary goals were to maximize audience reach and avoid media waste. To effectively manage advertising spend for their client while boosting user reach in a privacy-compliant manner, GroupM turned to Equativ and Utiq.

As the first ad platform to feature integrated frequency capping within an SSP to optimize media spend and campaign KPIs, we worked with GroupM to leverage our Equativ Buyer Connect (EBC) curation platform to build a scaled audience harnessing Utiq’s unique telco-powered first-party identifier to deliver a successful campaign for Dr. Oetker.

The Objective

The campaign’s primary objective, which ran during the 2024 UEFA European Championship, was to grow awareness of the Dr. Oetker brand among its affinity audience. This included: increasing audience reach, measuring and improving campaign frequency to build awareness without wasting impressions, and improving viewability. A deep understanding of audience data and the capacity of this high-profile sporting event to attract attention and awareness would be critical to success.

To reduce future reliance on third-party cookies, the campaign also sought to understand the effectiveness and accuracy of frequency capping when first-party identifiers were used in place of traditional cookies. In particular, GroupM wanted to test how this new approach allowed for ad frequency control in order to target consumers with relevant content without over-messaging and misspending campaign budget.

The Campaign

GroupM leveraged EBC, our self-serve, flexible curation platform to create, enrich, and scale their media buying to amplify Dr. Oetker’s brand. As the first platform to integrate Utiq’s Authentic Consent Service, it allowed GroupM to rapidly build a scaled, transparent, and premium authentic audience – instead of targeting by device – who were all consented and privacy compliant.

With Equativ being the first SSP to enable frequency capping at the deal level, campaign media spend and reach could be maximized while preventing ad waste. EBC also allowed for controlled impressions and optimized ad placements with the DSPs being used in the campaign.

To test the effectiveness of cookieless targeting (using Firefox and Safari browsers) against traditional cookie-led targeting, two display campaigns ran concurrently from June 20 – July 14 in the different environments.

The Results

Weekly campaign performance monitoring was conducted for both approaches across the duration of the campaigns and the campaign running in the cookieless environment significantly outperformed the one relying on cookies.

  • User reach increased by 48.3%, while impressions served were 56% higher than in the cookie-led campaign. The cookie-driven approach also disregarded a percentage of the audience due to its low segmentation and measurement capacity.
  • 21% of ads were wasted in the cookie-led campaign because of duplications within the model. In addition to reducing inefficient impressions, the cookieless approach led to a higher campaign ROAS.
  • Our ability to analyze under-impacted audiences offered insights into the campaign’s impact distribution from the start by using Utiq’s deterministic solution. This offered new understandings of each campaign’s behaviors beyond just the optimal frequency of impact.
  • The cookieless campaign delivered a higher viewability rate – coming in at 75%, which was five points above overall standards.

“As a company in the consumer goods sector, maximizing and correctly measuring the reach of our communications is crucial because they ensure that our messages reach a wide audience without saturating consumers,” said Teresa Costa Macedo, Marketing Director Iberia at Dr. Oetker. “We wanted to be pioneers in Spain by incorporating Utiq technology that allows us to maximize and streamline the impact of our campaign, guaranteeing that our product is always present in the consumer’s mind just when they are ready to make a purchase. It not only improves the effectiveness of our marketing strategies, but also, strengthens our brand in a highly competitive market.”

Miguel Ángel Miguelez, Data Strategy & Activation Director of GroupM, said, “At GroupM, we are delighted to collaborate with Utiq to improve Dr. Oetker’s results. Advertising is undergoing a transformation at high speed, and Utiq is one solution that seeks to change strategies based on identities, consents, and data; focusing on transparency and user trust. In addition, it solves dilemmas of the cookieless ecosystem, such as more reliable frequency management, incremental reach, and control in browsers like Safari, Firefox, and Opera. The data obtained in the campaign reflects its potential to maximize the reach of advertising strategies. This alliance reinforces our commitment to leading the way towards a safer and more privacy-friendly digital marketing future.”

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