TBWA\Helsinki: Disrupting the world of advertising with data-driven campaigns

TBWA is The Disruption® Company. Named one of the World’s Most Innovative Companies by Fast Company and Adweek’s 2018 Global Agency of the Year, TBWA is not your traditional ad agency network—it’s a radically open creative collective.

Eemeli Tani, Campaign Analyst, and Jesse Korhonen, Insights Analyst, are from the TBWA\Helsinki office and they’re responsible for researching cultural insights, developing campaign strategies, and analyzing performance in order to show the impact of their disruption and deliver client satisfaction. For Eemeli and Jesse, Supermetrics has simplified the collection of marketing data from multiple platforms so they can spend more time planning, managing, and analyzing successful campaigns that have led to TBWA\Helsinki being named as Finland’s Agency of the Year 2019 & Digital Agency of the Year 2019.

How do you measure disruption?

As one of the biggest creative marketing agencies in the world, TBWA runs large-scale campaigns for a large number of clients. The client companies operate in both B2B and B2C sectors and come from a variety of different industries. From such diversity of companies comes diversity in projects. The challenge for TBWA is that for each and every client they have to create disruptive campaigns that will spark conversations, engage their audience, and generate business results.

But how do you measure disruption? As campaigns intersect the physical and digital worlds, are distributed through multiple channels, and generate buzz across a variety of social platforms, it’s challenging to gather all the needed data in one place. Add to this the fact that the success of each campaign is measured differently: the key metrics vary from one case to another ranging from brand reach and e-commerce sales on the consumer side to qualified leads and CPA on the corporate side.

The ability to effectively track the statistics of each campaign is crucial as it shows which areas have performed well and where more insight and work is needed.

TBWA, superpowered

Back in 2016, TBWA\Helsinki team was running a Neste campaign with Prince Ea. In his inspiring YouTube speech, the spoken word artist encouraged the audience to create a “Brand new ending” and think about their future. As the next step, the audience was prompted to visit Neste’s website to contribute their ideas for sustainable development.

The campaign ran on many social networks generating over 500 million video views and a whole lot of buzz. When the social marketing activities were coming to an end, the project team faced the challenge of collecting the engagement data about each social post, tweet, or comment to measure the campaign’s performance and overall impact.

The situation was extremely challenging: there were thousands of posts on multiple platforms with data needing to be gathered into a single report. Doing this task manually was extremely counterproductive as it required hours of manual work to put the numbers into spreadsheets.

This was the turning point. The team started looking for solutions and discovered Supermetrics.

Eemeli says, “It was very easy to get started. If you know what metrics & dimensions you want, and you can use Sheets, then it’s very easy. The Supermetrics team has also been very helpful. Probably one of the biggest things is the transparency of the data as it comes from the API straight away. There is no middleman. Other solutions might have their own “score” which they have invented, and it means nothing, basically.”

Supermetrics has become a key component of the TBWA tech stack with new hires learning how to use the product during their onboarding. Jesse explains that: “Using the Supermetrics sidebar has become something we teach our team’s trainees to do nowadays. During a new hires’ first weeks, they’ll learn the Google ecosystem, social listening tools, and Supermetrics. We treat Supermetrics as its own entity in onboarding since it’s such an important tool.”

Data-driven disruption: how TBWA uses data to achieve success

So how did Supermetrics become such an important tool for TBWA? Well, it’s used across all phases of the campaign process: from insights and ideation to monitoring and final reporting.

The planning phase

During the planning phase, Supermetrics helps pull data to get insights on a particular topic. Data is in the core of TBWA’s planning process, and Supermetrics is widely used to fuel creative thinking. Use cases vary from discovering hidden signals to understanding the influencers of the selected field. After the campaign theme & flow are decided upon and the KPIs agreed, the team develops the creatives. Next, the campaign is launched.

The monitoring phase

As soon as the campaign is launched, the client always has access to the data: if the campaign starts on Monday, the real-time dashboard is shared with the client’s team on the same day. This way, the client can track the progress and make sure that the KPI targets are met.

“One of the competitive edges of TBWA\Helsinki is that with Supermetrics, every time we start a campaign we can be as transparent to the client as possible. We build reports so that we can see what is happening in real time, rather than pulling the reports together afterwards,” Jesse explains.

With big campaign investments, it is crucial for the team to be able to monitor budget pacing in real time. Supermetrics helps easily pull the spend data to see how it is proceeding and whether a change of direction is needed.

Many times during mid-campaign the client had a specific question they needed an answer to. With the help of Supermetrics, the data can be easily pulled from different sources so the campaign project team can answer the question quickly.

In addition, it is important to steer the campaign in the right direction as it progresses: the team needs to figure out which posts and platforms work better and which don’t to allocate more budget to the ones that bring a higher return on ad spend.

The reporting phase

After the campaign is finished, all the data is pulled into a final report which is then presented to the client. This allows the team to make an in-depth analysis and show the impact made.

For TBWA, the Supermetrics social media connectors are the ones which are used the most, both for organic and paid social efforts. In addition, the team also needs to track what actions users perform on the website, so they use the Google Analytics connector to pull the needed on-site data. Finally, as the scale of the campaigns got bigger, TBWA\Helsinki analysts turned to programmatic platforms and used DoubleClick Supermetrics connectors to fetch ad data.

The impact of Supermetrics

“Collecting data from fragmented data sources is something we struggle with every day and this is something Supermetrics helps us with this.” Jesse says.

The TBWA\Helsinki insights team shared that collectively, they have saved hundreds of hours of manual work by using Supermetrics. This, in turn, freed up time for more important tasks, such as client communication and campaign analysis.

“We can spend the time Supermetrics frees to provide more to our clients. We can look into the why rather than getting the what,” Eemeli says.

Supermetrics helps gather data from a variety of different sources easily and make reporting transparent, however, more importantly, it contributes to a bigger trend of making data-informed decisions. With the help of Supermetrics, TBWA\Helsinki’s creative team can back up each and every decision it makes with reliable data. By doing so, the agency establishes its credibility and trustworthiness for clients.

The TBWA\Helsinki is seen as one of the leading offices in terms of client reporting within the whole TBWA group. Other offices from around the globe have reached out to Helsinki team to get advice on how they are doing reporting to replicate the success the Finnish TBWA team had.

Jesse concludes that, “As the world develops, there is a growing need for data. Every creative decision we make needs to be made on data. It needs to be fact checked, and this is something Supermetrics can help us with.” Eemeli adds, “All in all, it’s a big competitive advantage, not just Supermetrics, but the whole use of data. And you’re there to make it more straightforward and accessible.”

At Supermetrics, we’re super proud to help Jesse, Eemeli, and the whole TBWA\Helsinki team realise this competitive advantage and play a part in helping them disrupt the future.

Want to effectively measure the impact of your campaigns like the TBWA\Helsinki team? Start your Supermetrics free trial here!