Background

ASFINAG is an infrastructure company in Austria, owned by the state. The tasks are: plan, fund, build, maintain, operate and collect toll along almost 2,250 kilometers of motorways and expressways in Austria. ASFINAG’s media partner is GroupM - the world's leading media investment company, responsible for more than $63 billion in annual media investment through its subsidiary agencies.

Challenge

As part of its environmental remit, ASFINAG wanted to raise awareness of the ever-growing problem of plastic waste. More than 8,000 tons of rubbish end up in the rubbish bins in ASFINAG’s rest areas, as well as on the roads. One of the main culprits is single-use plastic bottles. Asides from costing 13 million euros per year, plastic waste represents a danger to human health, the environment and road safety.

Concept

The goal of the campaign was to discourage the public from single-use plastic bottles, and instead promote reusable bottles which could be filled up with drinking water at one of the 55 ASFINAG rest areas. The tagline was "Fill up, don’t throw away". To engage the public, ASFINAG created an online ‘sustainability quiz’. The quiz challenged participants to test their knowledge on plastic waste and its devastating consequences. Successful submissions were entered into a draw to win a stainless-steel drinking bottle and a travel drinking bowl for dogs.

‍Objective

The objective of the campaign was click optimization on Facebook, with traffic directed to the environmental quiz landing page.  

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Execution

To support the "Fill up, don’t throw away" message, GroupM ran paid ads on Facebook. As the message played on the notions of drinking and thirst, which of course become increasingly more relevant in hot weather - GroupM

introduced a weather targeting component into their Facebook activations. A multi-location utomation was created in WeatherAds targeting Austria – with weather targeting implemented with city-level granularity. Rules were created to switch on the ads in geos where temperatures exceeded 28 degrees. A second set of ads with a different message would be served when the weather was cooler, i.e. below 28 degrees. The campaign ran throughout the summer months in Austria.
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‍Results

The weather activated Facebook campaigns performed exceptionally well. The ads saw click- through rates pushing 7%, as well as a lower cost per click. The client was very happy with the ability to trigger on real-time temperature signals and to introduce such a level of contextual relevancy to the ads.

• Click-through rates of 7%

• Lower cost per click (CPC)

• Increased ad relevancy

“Performance was very good. The ads for the different weather targeting [states] performed really well with click rates of up to 7%”.

- Daniel Schenkermaier, account manager, GroupM

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