The Kansas Department of Health and Environment was running a COVID Testing campaign in early 2021. They had been using the largest (and most well-known) agency in the state but did not like the results they were getting so they decided to change agencies. I was put in charge of placing their commercials across multiple platforms and targeting multiple different demographics. I was allotted roughly half of the budget that I requested but expectations did not decrease.
The client was using grant money so there were very strict guidelines on what HAD to be done with the media buy. The ads had to cover the entire state (all 105 counties), and had to target multiple, very different demos (All Adults, African American, and Hispanic in both English and Spanish). The campaign was to run from April – June, however, they also wanted to run a short campaign in March that targeted Spring Breakers. I split the campaign up into two separate campaigns since the March target demo would all be under 25.
For the March campaign, I worked with the state and media outlets to determine the weeks that every college and the large high schools would be on spring break. We then targeted those regions leading up to and during their specific spring break time. We utilized specific digital targeting ads as well as Streaming TV and Streaming Audio all targeting only the demo that we were going after.
For the April – June campaign, we broke the targeting out into 9 different demographics, 3 under each of the main demos. Each of the main demos (All Adults, African Americans, and Hispanics) were then targeted by age with three ranges (18-34, 35-54, & 55+) to make sure that we were spreading the ads out to the entire adult population and not overloading any sub-demo. We utilized streaming and digital ads to achieve these very targeted ads and then used traditional TV, traditional Radio, and Billboards to fill out the coverage across the entire state and make sure we weren’t missing anyone who still relied on traditional mediums.
Overall, the campaign ran for roughly 3 ½ months and was scheduled to receive 32,627,568 total impressions…which we overdelivered on for a total of around 33 MILLION impressions. On the traditional medium side (TV and Radio) we received nearly 20,000 commercials that covered the entire state of Kansas. All of this was accomplished in two weeks and over $35,000 (NET) UNDER BUDGET.
HIGHLIGHTS: One of my favorite accomplishments with this buy was how well we stretched the money. Again, I requested nearly double what I was given to work with so I knew I had to get creative with how I spent the money. I was able to work with two different digital and streaming companies to place all of our Streaming TV, Streaming Audio, Web Banners, and Targeted Digital ads. When negotiating the streaming and digital side, I got both companies to throw in the traditional schedules that we had been working on for free, totaling over $60,000 in Added Value just with those two companies.