For its World Cup credit card campaign, anb, one of the largest banks in the Middle East, achieved breakthrough results in terms of awareness. It innovated by pushing its campaign on social media channels through OMD’s Omni Custom Audiences, including Snapchat and TikTok for the first time in the country. The precise targeting approach delivered much higher levels of awareness in social media thanks to double-digit improvements in clickthrough and video completion rates.

To improve the performance of anb’s investments in paid social media, OMD adopted a more targeted approach, activating high-value audience segments through its Omni Custom Audiences (OCA) product instead of using the demographic targeting options offered by social platforms. OCA is a curated list of audiences, customized exclusively for Omnicom Media Group’s clients. The OCA product is powered by Omni, OMG's marketing orchestration platform.

Fuelled with enriched, GDPR-compliant data sets, OCA improves targeting strategies across digital channels and boosts campaign outcomes. OMD used them to build highly bespoke segments ideal for anb’s campaign and objective. They focused on credit card holders, non-credit card holders, frequent travelers, and football fans.

The results in terms of Click-Through Rate (CTR) and Video Completion Rate (VCR) were markedly better with OCA than with native targeting options, particularly on Snapchat and TikTok, two highly popular platforms in the Kingdom. The campaign on OCA achieved an 81% increase in CTR and a 23x increase in VCR on TikTok’s native audiences. On Snapchat, the improvement in native audiences was a 22% higher swipe-up rate and +18% in VCR.

From left to right: George Achkouty, Head of Digital at OMD Saudi Arabia, and Bader S. Alboqami, Head of Marketing and Customer Experience at anb

“Social media is core to our digital marketing, but we wanted a more surgical approach to reaching our audience than what was available on the platforms. As first-party data is a very sensitive issue for banks, the only alternative is quality third-party audience segments. The ability to access them on social media in Saudi Arabia, especially popular platforms like Snapchat and TikTok, is a major step forward,” Bader S. Alboqami, Head of Marketing and Customer Experience at anb, said. “The improvements on native segments with OMD’s OCA are impressive. The double-digit increases in CTR and VCR across all our social channels give us much scope to improve our overall marketing performance.”

“Up until now, standard practice was to run campaigns using social platforms’ native audiences and targeting options. OMG’s premium segments are curated by experienced data scientists who regularly analyze the data to ensure very high match rates and optimal campaign performance,” said George Achkouty, Head of Digital at OMD Saudi Arabia. “The first-in-Saudi test more than confirmed the validity and value of this approach and we expect to see more campaigns being pushed this way through our Omni Custom Audiences product. Looking at the results, this innovative way to target carefully and precisely defined audiences on the most relevant social media channels is bound to rapidly become mainstream, in Saudi and beyond.”

These results beat all expectations. This has motivated the decision to build further on this approach and widen the audience targeting strategy using quality custom segments, built on contextual, demographic, behavioral, and geographical data. It will improve the reach, affinity, and conversions of the bank’s paid social and programmatic campaigns.