case study
Diversity Marketing Case Study: Uniting Voices and Amplifying Change for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
9x Higher CTR Against Prior Campaign Benchmark
56% of YouTube Ad Clicks Resulted In Engaged Website Sessions (20+ sec)
Love Has No Labels is one of Ad Council’s landmark social movement campaigns. It is a social movement campaign aimed at promoting diversity, inclusion, and acceptance. The campaign focused on raising awareness of issues currently impacting the LGBTQ, AAPI, and Black communities through powerful video messaging.
In this campaign, 3 creative iterations were leveraged at various video lengths across YouTube. The goal was to drive video views for our messaging and direct users to the Love Has No Labels landing page to read more about the various issues. The campaign targeted A18+ with specific search term groups as well as broader political interests to reach those who already have an interest in these topics.
The result wrapped with impressive metrics, with 13.9M video impressions, 3.6M video views, 431K clicks, and 241K web sessions that lasted over 20 seconds. Most notably, the campaign saw a strong CTR at 3.09%, which was 9 times higher than our Love Has No Labels campaign on YouTube in the prior year! This achievement reflects the effectiveness of the implementation of our learnings from the prior year. We continued to optimize and hone in on the audiences most ready to receive the important message of actively being a part of a better society.
#LGBTQ
#Allyship
#GayRights
#SocialCause
#LoveHasNoLabels
#Equality
#DiversityMarketing
Unveiling a Decade of Impact: Love Has No Labels Campaign Evolution and Execution
Launched in 2015 by the Ad Council, the Love Has No Labels campaign is now in its ninth year of execution. This diversity marketing campaign is a landmark, award-winning success for the Ad Council. It was the winner in the “Social Goods Campaign” category at the Shorty Awards in 2016. At one point, it was the 2nd most-viewed video on Facebook in 2015 and was the second most-viewed social activism video ever behind Kony 2012. Love Has No Labels strives to foster understanding and empathy across different identities and communities by bringing attention to implicit biases that exist within us.
Over the 9 years, the campaign objective has shifted to fit the needs of the times. In partnership with Llama Lead Gen, our execution aimed to mobilize those who believe in equality but are currently complacent and inactive about achieving it. The campaign leveraged 3 different video variations centered around issues faced by the AAPI, Black, and LGBTQ communities. The goal was to reach socially conscious viewers who believe in equality but are currently passive towards the cause, coined as the “Armchair Supporter”.
The campaign targeted various groups of specific search terms around each video as well as a broader interest in political and social advocacy terms. The goal was to raise awareness of the social issues and drive viewers to the landing page to engage deeper with the cause.
Diversity Marketing Campaign Objectives and Goals
This campaign's primary objective was to continue raising awareness and knowledge of issues faced by diverse and marginalized groups. Love Has No Labels aimed to:
Address current divisiveness in our society by building empathy and eroding implicit bias
Increase understanding of issues currently faced by the AAPI, Black, and LGBTQ communities
Mobilize and empower those who have an interest in social issues but are currently complacent and inactive
The Challenge
Refining Audience Segmentation and Engagement Tactics
The Ad Council team came to Llama Lead Gen to continue to refine and optimize this historical activation. With a range of videos targeted towards three different causes, it was important to correctly segment the videos to the specific audiences while also finding an overarching audience that fits our “Armchair Supporter” segment.
The main challenge of this campaign was to understand the proper split between specific and broad audience segmenting to ensure that each of the causes/videos received sufficient support. With longer-form video creatives available, we were looking to find the balance between driving video views and the campaign’s ultimate goal of driving engaged viewers to the landing page.
The Ad Council sought collaboration with Llama Lead Gen to refine their strategy for effectively engaging the ideal audience and boosting both video viewership and website clicks. Building upon the success of previous campaigns between The Ad Council and Llama Lead Gen, we leveraged existing trust and prior learnings to ensure a successful campaign.
Diversity Marketing Strategy
The Ad Council and Llama Lead Gen chose YouTube as the main platform for this video campaign. The team wanted to leverage advanced keyword and search targeting on YouTube to serve our videos along with relevant content. Across YouTube, the campaign targeted search terms that are broadly related to Political and Social Advocacy interests. Additionally, given the social cause-specific video creatives, we also segmented out audiences that were targeted towards specific keywords relating to AAPI, LGBTQ and Black communities.
The campaign leveraged 15, 30, and 60-second video creatives to drive traffic back to the campaign landing page. The goal was to get viewers to go to the landing page and engage with more information about specific social issues faced by different communities. With the campaign set up, we were interested in understanding performance differences between each of the communities as well as the difference between Search Terms and Interest targeting in their effectiveness drive viewers to our website.
We monitored the campaign performances and made regular budget optimizations based on audience performance. A mix of videos was leveraged to allow platform optimization flexibility. Llama Lead Gen worked together with the Ad Council to ensure that the ad copy aligned with each video.
Solution & Implementation
Upon gaining a comprehensive understanding of the campaign's strategy and objectives, we collaborated with the Ad Council to finalize ad copy and ensured alignment with the selected target audiences. The Llama Lead Gen team was fully responsible and owned campaign setup, execution, and regular optimization on the YouTube platform.
Our diversity marketing campaign was launched, followed by our meticulous QA process to ensure the proper setup of campaigns, audiences, and ads. Our team diligently monitored daily performance, making budget adjustments based on the effectiveness of ads and target audiences. Strategically reallocated media weight to more efficient audiences and ads.
Throughout the campaign flight, the pacing was consistent. However, the campaign did struggle to serve the LGBTQ video creative (Barbara) as Google deemed that it violated the ‘Sexual orientation in personalized advertising’ policy. Through the remainder of the flight, Google continued to restrict impressions served against this video creative.
Diversity Marketing Campaign Performance & Data
The campaign had a primary objective to raise awareness of three different social issues and drive viewers to the Love Has No Labels landing page to learn more. We leveraged both broad Interest and issue-specific Search Terms targeting to hone in on our ideal users. Throughout the campaign, we garnered impressive metrics at 13.9M video impressions, 3.6M video views, 431K clicks, and 241K web sessions that lasted over 20 seconds. Most impressively, we were able to achieve a CTR of 3.09% which is 9 times higher than our Love Has No Labels campaign on YouTube in the prior year at 0.34%!
Overall, we noted that broad interests in political and social advocacy search terms drove the strongest results in CTR. Specifically, interest in political sites and terms saw a CTR of 3.01% and received 38% of all campaign impressions. Of the issue-specific keyword targeting, the videos focused on AAPI and Black communities saw similar results with CTR hovering around the campaign average. Unfortunately, the LGBTQ ad group received very limited impressions throughout the flight due to Google’s policy violation flag of the creative.
From a creative perspective, the algorithm favored our long-form videos at 60 seconds. Overall, the 60 second versions of Maddy (AAPI) and the Gentle Giant (BLM) videos received a combined 84% of the campaign budget. When looking at video view metrics, the campaign had a 25% video completion rate with 51% of the viewers completing at least a quarter of the videos. This is impressive as a majority of our budget went against the 60-second videos, meaning that 51% of our audiences watched at least 15 seconds of our videos, and 25% of the viewers likely finished watching the full-minute ad. This is an indication that we were able to successfully reach highly relevant viewers with our audience targeting.
Outside of platform metrics, from a web analytics perspective, our media efforts resulted in 431K clicks to the website with 56% (241K) of those users engaging with our content for over 20 seconds! While the media team has no direct influence over a user’s actions once they leave the ad platform, the high site engagement that we saw was another strong indicator that Llama Lead Gen was able to source the most qualified audience.
13,949,642
Impressions
431,612
Clicks to Site
240,826
Time on Site 20+ Seconds (56% of all clicks)
I’m most impressed by how proactive the Llama Lead Gen team is with managing our campaigns. Deliverables are always on time (with little to no edits needed); recommendations on how to improve our campaigns are expected. It’s truly a breath of fresh air to have partners who are always on top of everything.
Rasheia Harris
Digital Media Director @ Ad Council
Moving Forward
Looking at the current state of our society, it seems that we are more divided than ever. With one scroll of our fingertips, we can see everything that is happening all around us. It's easy to succumb to the urge to withdraw and disconnect in the face of such overwhelming realities. In its ninth year of activation, Love Has No Labels wants to urge those “Armchair Supporters” to persist in their engagement as many communities don’t have the privilege or option to disengage. The campaign featured three video variations focused on issues faced by the AAPI, LGBTQ, and Black communities to drive viewers to the landing page and learn more about how they can get involved in a cause.
Across YouTube, we were able to generate 13.9M video impressions, 3.6M video views, and 431K clicks at a 3.09% CTR. What is most remarkable from a web analytic perspective was that 56% or 241K of the users who made it to the landing page, engaged with the site for over 20 seconds. This metric, along with a 9x improvement in our CTR YoY were strong indicators that we were able to reach the right audiences.
There were many learnings throughout the campaign. Given the campaign's strong metrics, we felt confident in the audiences that we have chosen. One major learning was that we did see broad Political interest and Social Advocacy search terms saw a higher CTR to the landing page. In the future, we would like to continue to expand into this line of thinking for our segments.
Given the restriction on the Barbara (LGBTQ) creative, we were unable to gain a proper read on its performance. In the next iteration, the team will preemptively work with Google to ensure that this creative is in line with their policy before launch.
The Ad Council's satisfaction with the campaign's performance serves as a testament to its outstanding success, affirming the effectiveness of our strategic approach. The results not only show the significant impact we've made together but highlight the sizable improvement we were able to achieve by improving upon prior activations.
If you're focused on amplifying your messaging for an important social cause and finding the right audience to connect with, Llama Lead Gen is your go-to partner. We excel in designing targeted campaigns centered around traffic and video views, ensuring your marketing objectives are not just achieved but exceeded.
It was an honor to continue to drive success for the historic Love Has No Labels campaign. Partner with us to make your campaign equally impactful.
