DON’T FRET ABOUT IT

Fender, founded in 1946, is a brand that’s been synonymous with music for decades. Their guitars have transformed music worldwide, across all ages, in nearly every genre. Influencing famous musicians to aspiring artists, Fender guitars have always been a status symbol in the music industry.

This year, Fender launched the American Professional Range, which involved five of their most recognisable guitars being completely re-packaged and aimed at a brand new audience. Each guitar in the range has been updated with unique enhancements, as the brand aims to appeal to a new generation of seasoned guitarists, as well as those just starting out on their musical journeys.

CHALLENGE.

AMPLIFIED AWARENESS - Our mission was simple: use the exciting launch of the American Professional Range to drive mass awareness. We knew it was time to start making some serious noise.

The real challenge here was to make sure we were being as effective as we could possibly be - how could we guarantee that Fender would resonate with its target audience, while not wasting spend on the people it wouldn’t move?

We needed to get the campaign in front of as many musicians as possible on a limited budget, and with very focused targeting. Adding to the challenge were the strict campaign KPI’s, particularly around engagement. This meant that we needed put a lot of emphasis on the WHO and the HOW to engage with the target audience.

STRATEGY.

A FINELY TUNED CAMPAIGN - In preparation for our Video and Display campaigns, we augmented Fender’s own research with a multitude of audience data from Google Analytics. By combining it with demographics and affinity interest category data we were able to define a specific audience and fine tune our messaging. We were even able to suggest which guitar model would most likely resonate with a user by mining the data to produce valuable insight.

The second step was to further interrogate the online behaviour of the identified audience segments by leveraging GWI - a cutting edge digital consumer insights tool.

WE ASKED THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS:

        - Where was this audience spending their time online?

        - What devices they were using, and what devices are they using to “second screen”?

        - Where and when were they researching their purchases?

        - And, most importantly, what were brands doing to successfully reach and capture their imaginations?

As a result, we built up an incredibly detailed landscape of our target audience, mapping out their online behaviour, something we were only able to do because of a great tool like GWI.

Equipped with the blueprints of our target audience, we set about building hypergranular campaigns across YouTube, Facebook and Google Display Network.

By using every available targeting method possible, our defined audiences were reached via: affinity and custom affinity targeting, in-market segments, placements, topics, keywords and granular retargeting lists - all while overlaying demographic, time of day and device data.

In addition, through careful analysis of the video campaign, we assembled an even broader list of refined custom audiences. This allowed us to implement a consequent retargeting campaign.

Highly engaged users were identified (e.g. those viewers who watched 50% or more of the video) and retargeted with longer videos that revealed more information for each specific model. The result of this process was a list of people we could say with complete confidence were interested in the Fender AP range and which model they preferred.

This remarketing was taken even further by using these lists across multiple channels - from YouTube, to Display to Facebook – always delivering a consistent message at each touch point. These potential customers were targeted with engaging interactive Facebook carousel and canvas content to drive them to the Fender site. Additionally, the landing pages were personalised with the make and colour of the guitar they’d shown interest in.

RESULTS.

This campaign came with a relatively short window and budget, but it was clear that the activity really resonated with the audience. Our diligent approach to audience targeting helped it exceed all industry and sector benchmarks for engagement, showing Fender the real value of their digital marketing budget.

We smashed the benchmark! The average CTR for ‘Music & Audio’ Google display banners in the UK is 0.06%. This campaign delivered a CTR over 10 times that at 0.62% highlighting the accuracy of targeting.

37% of all video views unskipped

8.9m Youtube impressions

2.2 years of Fender video content watched

40k earned views - 100% Free