Situation

Mega luxury resort Baha Mar continues to be a state-of-the-art destination in the Caribbean. Baha Mar Resort offers over 2,500 hotel rooms and residences, the Caribbean’s largest casino, an ESPA spa, a Jack Nicklaus golf course, multiple celebrity chef restaurants, luxury shopping, and more. Since its spectacular opening, the resort destination has gained multiple national exposures through high-impact TV programs, including the Real Housewives of Miami, ABC’s The Bachelor, and the Golf Channel. 

As their marketing partner, Net Conversion faces the challenges of sustaining revenue growth and brand awareness year over year through an integrated marketing strategy that would maximize all media channels as performance channels – cue CTV testing as a new targeted awareness tactic.  

The way marketers are using CTV is evolving. Where TV has been primarily used as a brand marketing and awareness tool, CTV has transformed the big screen into a performance channel. Since Jan 2023, viewers have spent more time with CTV than ever. This year, time spent with digital video is predicted to surpass linear TV for the first time. More than 81% of marketers are using CTV to raise awareness of their brand or product; two-thirds classify it as a performance marketing channel—a number that is likely to grow as advertisers embrace the digital nature of the channel. Our goal – to prove CTV as a performance channel for Baha Mar Resort.

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Results

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Rolling out our multi-optimization strategy for Baha Mar to test Roku’s self-serving CTV platform allowed us to increase engaged website visits while decreasing cost/ViV month over month. 

Since launching in February, Roku has spent $170k so far in 2023 (YTD), driving 8.3k engaged visitors to the website while maintaining an average CPM of $18.42 and a Cost/ViV of $4.51. This test is still being tested; therefore, we will update these results once they are finalized in the coming months. In the meantime, we will continue optimizing the campaign to prove that CTV is an excellent performance channel expansion that can impact site visitation and future bookings. 

For other CTV media partners we may be testing in the future – check out our CTV Landscape POV blog here.

Objective

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• Test media partners that offer CTV services & allows analysts to make daily optimizations for CTV efforts
• Build brand awareness while driving low cost per view influenced visits to Baha Mar’s website

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Implementation

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The focus for testing Roku media partner for CTV was to establish how we could transform a reach channel into a performance channel based on the optimization levers we could use to drive website visitation. For this test, we used the Roku self-serve platform, which allowed for audience and channel layering, demographics, and national geo-targeting within their CTV campaigns. Our CTV strategy involved reaching consumers with a household income (HHI) of $150K+ and who also showed intent to travel to the Bahamas or the Caribbean. Once we launched our test, we initiated a multi-optimization strategy to ensure the campaign was performing as efficiently as possible and optimizing towards qualified website visitation.

Below are the three levers pulled to reach our marketing objectives: 

• Compared all publishers in the campaign and negated high CPM publishers to decrease lower cost per view. 
• Updated campaign frequency cap from 12 impressions every six days to 3 per day with a one impression max per hour. Our goal was to determine what frequency allowed for the lowest CPA without seeing an adverse change in volume and cost per view.
• Create a lookalike audience based on consumers that viewed the CTV video ad and visited the website (completed a View-Influenced Visit or ViV) and optimized this lookalike audience towards an engaged view-influenced visit (eViV) that included visiting more than 2+ pages on the Baha Mar Resort website. 

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Messaging-wise, the main objective was to enhance brand awareness through a captivating CTV video asset. The Baha Mar Resort team crafted an impactful asset that was strategically designed to captivate viewers and pique their interest based on all the different offerings Baha Mar has to offer to guests – including their water park, award-winning restaurants, numerous pools across the property, etc.