Case Study: State Lottery Builds Awareness with Simpli.fi's Addressable OTT/CTV Solution
Advertiser Overview
• Run by a Georgia school system during the 2020 election
• State lottery looking to build awareness for holiday scratch-off campaign
• Sought to improve match rate for first-party address list targeting
• Exclusively used OTT/CTV and pre-roll video ads
Agency Overview
• Award-winning international independent agency
• 70+ year history
• New partner with Simpli.fi running campaigns for multiple clientsResults
• 98.53%OTT/CTV Video Completion Rate
• 1.4 million Unique User Reach
• 67.3% Pre-Roll Video Completion Rate
STATE LOTTERY BRAND LOYALTY AND AWARENESS
In 2019, U.S. lottery sales reached the highest ever yearly purchase amount by exceeding $91 billion. Lotteries have active player bases with loyal followings, and encouraging continuous play is key to reloading the prize pool via ticket sales. One state lottery organization, armed with a proprietary list of loyalty club lottery players, recognized the need to build awareness and drive sales through OTT/CTV advertising and pre-roll video.
At the end of 2020, the lottery embarked on a holiday advertising campaign and wanted to find a new partner that would improve their addressable OTT/CTV and programmatic video performance. They wanted to target as many lottery players as possible with engaging video ads on large-screen streaming devices. The state lottery worked with their advertising agency and enlisted Simpli.fi to improve their previous programmatic provider’s address match rate and therefore maximize reach.
The agency recently chose to partner with Simpli.fi to leverage superior household-level targeting for OTT/CTV advertising and more. The ultimate goal of the campaign was to drive awareness for the holiday scratch-off game, with a KPI to achieve a 95% OTT/CTV Video Completion Rate (VCR) and also a high
pre-roll VCR.
PRECISE HOUSEHOLD-LEVEL TARGETING
With Simpli.fi’s Addressable Geo-Fencing targeting tactic, the lottery could reach their player base at the household-level with OTT/CTV ads and pre-roll video. They provided the agency with a first-party data list of 850,000 addresses compiled from their loyalty rewards program, which was uploaded to the Simpli.fi platform at a 92% match rate ‚Äì far exceeding the previous programmatic provider’s IP-based solution.
Simpli.fi’s addressable solution is superior to other offerings because it leverages GPS data paired with publicly available plat line data to match addresses to the exact shape and size of the property. This means that targeting is much more granular and precise than traditional address-level targeting offerings which rely heavily on IP-based targeting tactics. IP-based targeting is a decent way to cover a large swatch of land, but does not offer great precision because it typically uses a central location on a map to represent a broad geographical area and has ongoing truncation issues making it increasingly hard to accurately reach individual households.
After uploading this targeting audience, Simpli.fi’s Addressable Geo-Fencing solution used GPS data paired with plat lines to match each address to the exact physical location, shape, and size of the property. The system then automatically built a target fence around each property to serve ads across all devices in the household, including connected TVs, smartphones, tablets, and desktops.
This approach helped maximize awareness over the two-month campaign by ensuring that lottery players saw ads on all of their de vices. The focus was on large-screen OTT/CTV ads, but Simpli.fi’s cross-device matching capabilities also enabled pre-roll video ads served on small screen devices. This targeting strategy was supported by video creative featuring :30 second large-screen OTT/CTV ads and :15 second small-screen pre-roll ads.
MEASURING HOLIDAY AWARENESS CAMPAIGN RESULTS
Shortly after the campaign launch, the Simpli.fi team identified several methods to increase the VCR. Simpli.fi made mid-flight optimizations such as shifting budgets to the highest performing device types. Furthermore, due to the sensitive nature of advertising related to gambling, there are restrictions and limitations on where lottery ads can be served. Despite these challenges, Simpli.fi maximized the available inventory by focusing on more than 2,000 high-performing domains on an allowlist and by blocklisting underperforming sites. These optimizations helped raise the VCR by more than 20% in just a few days.
Simpli.fi’s high match rate of first-party addresses and data-driven optimizations led to a successful awareness campaign. The holiday lottery message reached 1.4 million unique viewers during the two-month flight. Additionally, the Video Completion Rate for OTT/CTV ads was 98.5%, exceeding the goal of 95%. The pre-roll video element also achieved a high 67.3% VCR and .17 CTR. Overall, the client and agency were extremely happy with Simpli.fi’s ability to efficiently build awareness of the holiday scratch-off game among its player base.
STAGE 1
Audience Upload and Match
The advertiser provided a first-party address list with more than 850,000 addresses. Simpli.fi achieved a match rate of 92%.
STAGE 2
Addressable Geo-Fencing
The Simpli.fi system automatically built a target fence around each address using publicly available plat line and GPS data to match each address to the exact physical location, shape, and size of the property.
STAGE 3
OTT/CTV Advertising
Simpli.fi served OTT/CTV ads to large-screen connected TVs and pre-roll ads to small-screen devices including smartphones, tablets, and desktops to maximize exposure.
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