Mumbai India — With increased competition across dominant social platforms like Facebook, resulting in a higher cost per lead (CPL), automotive brand ŠKODA AUTO India tapped PHD – its media agency partner and part of the Omnicom Media Group network – to optimize campaign efficiencies and generate a higher number of average daily leads at reduced CPL from its Facebook campaigns.

ŠKODA AUTO hoped to reach a broader and more profiled set of audiences via Facebook – car owners, first-time car buyers and enthusiasts alike, to generate qualified leads that can be converted down the consumer journey. The automotive brand faced a challenge with its objective of optimizing performance in terms of cost per lead efficiently. Manoeuvring on Lifetime Budgets at CBO instead of Daily Budgets at ABO was a hurdle it was looking to overcome whilst optimizing daily lead count and maintaining scale.

To streamline efficiencies across campaigns, the two companies collaborated with Pixis – whose powerful AI infrastructure helps make marketing effortlessly intelligent, agile and scalable for brands. Pixis deployed its Governance AI system, which uses AI models trained with billions of data points to allocate the bid budget on a daily basis dynamically.

With its data-driven recommendations, Pixis’ AI supported PHD Media in delivering sharper results on ŠKODA AUTO’s KPIs – helping the auto brand make the leap in its performance marketing campaigns. Upon implementing the recommendations to optimize lead generation, ŠKODA AUTO India was able to reach the desired high-quality audiences at the right time.

The results outperformed the quality of leads coming into the system, increased savings in terms of prospects, increased the average daily leads by nearly 17% for ŠKODA Superb and improved the CPL by approximately 10%. Similarly, the campaign around ŠKODA’s avant-garde Octavia also gained a 28% increase in average daily leads with Pixis’ AI infrastructure helping scale the campaign by almost 25%.

Speaking of the collaboration, Bharat Khatri, chief digital officer for Omnicom Media Group APAC, said, “With innovation and creativity at its core, PHD Media believes that the key to a cookie-less future lies in leveraging the right technology stack and interpreting a combination of different approaches to support all the key tasks around audience selection, targeting, governance, personalization, and most importantly, measurement.”

Khatri added, “With Pixis’ AI, we were able to bring down our acquisition cost drastically while maintaining scale. Pixis’ easy-to-use AI plugin helped our team deploy advanced people-powered, supervised AI and ML models that improved our cost per lead by 10% and also increased average daily leads volume by 17%.”

Meanwhile, Tarun Jha, head of marketing for ŠKODA AUTO India, shared, “With an infinite number of customer touchpoints today, reaching out to the right people at the right time remains imperative. We’re pleased with the campaign results and look forward to exploring more such opportunities with Pixis, guided by the counsel of our partners – PHD Media.”

Speaking on the collaboration, Neel Pandya, CEO of Pixis for Europe APAC, said, “We’re extremely happy to see how PHD Media leveraged the Pixis AI infrastructure to garner incredible performance on ŠKODA AUTO’s latest marketing campaigns. It’s a moment of true excitement and honour to continue working with PHD to facilitate greater business growth for ŠKODA, and other clients, through our AI systems.”

Singapore – Scoot, Singapore Airlines Group’s low-cost arm, has tapped brand and customer experience agency VMLY&R Singapore to help the airline’s creative strategies. Alongside this, Omnicom Advertising Group-owned network PHD has been appointed to handle global media planning and buying. 

The 2-year appointment follows a closed-door pitch. The mandate entails the creative partners to support Scoot’s aim to be a low-cost carrier that emphasises quality flying services at pocket-friendly pricing while maintaining stringent health and safety standards. On a global scale, integrated brand work will include digital, social, outdoor, and above-the-line media.

Named the World’s Best Long-Haul Low-Cost Airline by Skytrax in 2021, Scoot’s network encompasses 72  destinations across 16 countries and territories.

Agatha Yap, director of communications for brand and marketing of market partnerships and loyalty at Scoot, said that with the easing of border restrictions in many parts of the world, the future looks exciting for the airline. “It is therefore timely for us to fortify our strategies and efforts to rebuild travel confidence, strengthen our brand, and step up our role in enabling physical human connections, especially given the fact that we celebrate a decade of flights in June 2022,” Yap said

Yap added, “We look forward to working with VMLY&R and PHD as partners to build our brand narrative and creative pieces using the most relevant media channels to speak to our customers in key markets around the world.”  

Commenting on the win, Preethi Sanjeevi, managing director, VMLY&R Singapore, said that it’s always exciting to start working with a new client, but this feels amplified now that they’re seeing the resumption of air travel with restrictions being eased globally. 

“Being deprived of foreign travel means many people are eager to explore new and exciting destinations. Scoot is the perfect choice for people looking to pursue their travel dreams, and we’re really enjoying working together to help these travellers follow their wanderlust,” Sanjeevi said.

Meanwhile, Chloe Neo, chief operating officer of Omnicom Media Group Singapore commented, “The resumption of leisure travel presents new opportunities for us to tap on meaningful use of data to connect with travellers with greater empathy. Coupled with the calibre and passion of the team, we look forward to leveraging our network capabilities to build brand love and measurable business impact for Scoot.”