Keith Browning (3:54)

Who is Marina Prieto? Well, she's the face of the most successful B2B campaign we've ever done. JC Deco, leading outdoor company worldwide, presents Meet Marina Prieto. In 2023, subway ad investment went down by 7%. So to convince brands its media really worked, we chose her. Marina prieto, a lovely 100-year-old grandma creating her own content, but with no audience to see it. But that was about to change when overnight, we placed Marina's 54 Instagram posts in hundreds of vacant spaces in Madrid's subway. If she could go viral, maybe brands would change their minds.

Fergus O'Carroll (4:45)

It is wonderful, wonderful work. I remember when I first saw it, I was just sort of. There was a sense of joy from this work. Everything about it just seemed so wonderful and human in a time when humanity is a little bit confused. So I'm really thrilled to have Ricardo and Daniela here. Thank you both for joining us.

Keith Browning (5:09)

Thank you for having us. So glad to be here.

Daniela Bombinato (5:12)

Thanks for having us, Fergus. It's a pleasure.

Fergus O'Carroll (5:15)

So you guys have won, I mean, so many awards for this work. Titanium lion at can, a Grand Prix. It can a gold at can, two silvers, a bronze, three dnad pencils. And so much accolades for this work. And we're excited to sort of unpack the story behind this today and I think a couple of other ones this past week. Daniela.

Daniela Bombinato (5:42)

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, we were happy to listen to the news that we also got some Leahs on many categories from B2B to poster out of home and also creative strategy. So that is still generating a lot of good recognitions and awards throughout the market.

Fergus O'Carroll (6:04)

So important of course to point out it is a B2B case which we'd love to feature because there's not enough cases on our show that are B2B. So when great ones bubble up to the top, we kind of fight to make sure we get them on here. Let's start off, Ricardo, by maybe apologizing for the fact that I have a bit of a head cold today. So I may sound a little extra nasally, but let's talk about artistic. Tell us what impressed you the most about the results that were generated. What surprised you the most?

Keith Browning (6:36)

Well, that's. That's a very interesting question. I just want to say you mentioned this is a B2B campaign and at the heart and end game of the campaign, it is definitely B2B and it's right now that we're activating its full potential as a B2B campaign, let's say. But this campaign has a B2C component which actually activated the results for B2B. But I think the most interesting thing is the market reception and the quick understanding of what this campaign meant by part of our clients. And what I mean by this is that if you take a look at the Metro performance from the first quarter onwards for 2024, which is roughly three or four months after the campaign was, was open over, you start seeing an immediate effect on sales performance on the top revenue performance, where your average ticket for, for a, for a media, for, for a brand, for our media is basically twice what it was last year. And we have around 187 new brands trying out Metro supports. It's true that this is partially correlated to the fact that we placed new digital screens and we sort of uplifted the Metro environment a little bit. But even with that, if the environment itself is not repositioned as such, you wouldn't have such a good market reception. So it was pretty interesting to see how well brands just took to the idea and how much the Metro environment became fashionable and just became exciting, which hadn't been the case for a long, long time.

Fergus O'Carroll (8:18)

So Daniela, what would you add to that in terms of the results that impressed you?

Daniela Bombinato (8:22)

I think the reaction of people to a B2B campaign was something that we did not expect that much. So it was really a campaign that touched people by the heart that brought this warmth. And especially when we talk about B2B campaigns, the landscape, it's so monotonous, it's so predictable, it's so hard sell that think all types of people were touched by, by, by this campaign. You know, and I think that sometimes when, when we talk B2B people forget that, you know, behind LinkedIn profile there's a human being and, and, and, and there's possibility to bring emotion to, to all of this.

Fergus O'Carroll (9:07)

When you think about how this rolled out, were you in, in your media targeting, in your channels that you were using, were you going after brands or were you going after media shops, media buying shops or both?

Keith Browning (9:23)

So that's, that's a pretty good question because you would think a B2B campaign, naturally you have some sort of channel targeting and you, and you have to do this distinction. But here we opted for a different, different road to it. As I mentioned before, it's both B2C and B2B. It's a B2C that you have to perform well above the market norm. So you can convince because this is a campaign made by a media owner, which is very weird in and of itself. So normally we're the ones hosting campaigns, not making them. So what we did is David provided a brilliant B2C campaign for us, which was Marina. And if you think about this for a minute, this Marina Prieto, 11% of everyone exposed to the campaign sought her out organically on their mobile phones. That's over twice the industry best case lead conversion rates and that's about three times the industry standard for a ctr. So what you're talking about here is a very, very, very successful B2C campaign that's being performed by a creative agency and a media owner. So this turns into B2B when we use it as a case study of how B2C should perform in our media because it's a campaign that was used exclusively on, on, on out of home.

Fergus O'Carroll (10:50)

And so how, how did you feel, how were you confident in the halo effect, that it would reach people in the industry who were those brands?

Keith Browning (10:59)

Yeah, that's an interesting point. To your point, instead of targeting specific channels that you would traditionally utilize in B2B and making a fine point of targeting specific Personas, which is focused, our sole, let's say efforts initially on the biggest night of the industry here in Spain, which is the FE awards, basically, where you have over 80, 85% of all of your brand managers, media managers, general managers of media agencies, all of our real target audience, the ones with decision power and budget, let's say allowances. They were there, all of them, in one night. And JI Zeepecot is the sponsor, is one of the official sponsors for the FBA awards. So we have, let's say, a commercial spot within the ceremony. So what we did, in a sense it's just unveiled the fact that both David and Jesus Deco were behind this campaign that was already getting a lot of traction within the media. So we just made this big REVEAL that was 100%, let's say, probability to see with one giant OTS.

Fergus O'Carroll (12:10)

Oh, that's brilliant. That's brilliant. And so the. So this campaign launched and it was unbranded, you guys. JC Dacao was not associated with the initial launch.

Keith Browning (12:20)

Exactly. As a matter of fact. Yeah, Daniela can explain this better.

Daniela Bombinato (12:24)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We actually, I think the idea was to have this. This old lady who was not an influencer. So we posted 54 of our posts on, on the. On the metros. And actually she became a natural influencer because people were curious to know who she was. And one of the things that was an objective of this campaign was to actually provide irrefutable evidence that this media works. So why not use a comparison with the digital media to actually say that people, to prove that people were actually seeing are out of home and going to the Internet to follow. So what we did was we were fighting a medium that people were not necessarily including all the time in their media plans by using someone from the Internet, from social networks and making this person become an influencer. So this old lady soon became an influencer.

Fergus O'Carroll (13:38)

So it's interesting to me because I think from at least here in the US there is not a outside of retail media. There is not a hotter channel than out of home digital. Is that not the case in Spain?

Daniela Bombinato (13:52)

And this was not digital, right, Ricardo?

Keith Browning (13:55)

This was poster. Yeah, that's what I wanted to explain a little bit. So just to go back on your question regarding the nature of the campaign and as Daniela mentioned before, Fergus, I think it's very important to understand that we did this as a very, very, very strict stress test on media performance.

Daniela Bombinato (14:17)

Exactly.

Keith Browning (14:18)

Digital out of Chrome. Yes. Is in fashion. Okay. It's not as hot perhaps as in the United States, but it is in fashion. But the Metro was not digital and metro environment as it had no audience measurement whatsoever. It was full of paper, basically. It had not the greatest perception market level as the rest of oh media. So we had a big, let's say, challenge in front of us. And what this campaign did is we Tried to make a campaign that had very easy to trace KPIs. So the most important thing was whether Marina Prieto would get followers or not, how much percentage of interaction she would get, you know, the, the level of conversions rates she would get. That, that was going to be the interesting part.

Fergus O'Carroll (15:07)

But so she, so she was, she was on posters, not digital display out of home. She was in posters in metro, which is your subway system. So she was only in the subway system.

Keith Browning (15:19)

Only in the subway system.

Fergus O'Carroll (15:20)

Wonderful, wonderful.

Keith Browning (15:22)

But, but it's, it's even further stressed than that because it's only in Madrid. Only in Madrid subway and only in unsold paper spaces. So we were basically telling the market, here's all these spaces in paper that you think have no value in an environment that you believe has less value than the average out of home environment. And we're going to put here, let's say a very successful B2C campaign to show that if you just put a little more effort and a little bit more investment to purchase unsold paper spaces in metro in Madrid, you will get performance. And the interesting thing here is that most of the posts, because Marina Prieto, when we found her, she had 28 followers. So clearly the algorithm for meta was not working in her favor, despite the fact that a lot of content.

Fergus O'Carroll (16:17)

So in order to keep this sample or this experiment pure. And you couldn't even amplify this or boost this in social, right?

Keith Browning (16:26)

No, you couldn't. Initially, yeah. No, no. Not even initially or later on or in any way, shape or form. The interesting thing to prove here is that out of Home works sort of like a, like a primer, like a catalyst for campaign performance. So this is a campaign that was born on unsold spaces in the metro in Madrid, the post war in Galician. And the campaign took a life of its own outside. Ooh. Specifically because of the intrinsical relationship between mobile media, digital native media and out of home in itself. We set out to prove the fact that this is organic. And the campaign just took a life of its own. It became experiential, it became a social media campaign on its own organically. Then you had TV broadcasters just trying to interview Marina. You had radio. It took a life of its own. But it started in out of home, which was the interesting portion of the case. And then the KPIs just took off. You know, Marina's profile exploded.

Fergus O'Carroll (17:29)

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Daniela Bombinato (19:03)

Yeah, I think, yeah. Part of the idea to prove these kind of experiment that we were doing to prove in real life that this medium worked, we had to find someone who's actually not an influencer. Right. So that she would generate conversations. So actually the team analyzed so many profiles of.

Fergus O'Carroll (19:24)

But before you even go down that I'm like, I'm a step or two behind that I'm like going, okay, you're sitting down at a table, you know that you, you don't want to use an influencer because that's borrowed interest. But how do you even get to the fact that you want to use.

Daniela Bombinato (19:38)

To be super honest? To be super honest, it was the curiosity of the creative team to look for it and bring to us a whole bunch of profiles. And when we looked at Marina, it was unquestionable that she would have potential and that the story around her would be interesting.

Keith Browning (20:00)

So, but let me leave in there.

Fergus O'Carroll (20:02)

I'm sorry, just for the listener, because the listener may be thinking this too. We've leaped forward into your selecting personalities. And I'm just curious. Your job was to put an idea within these posters that would draw attention. You could have gone in any number of a thousand different directions, but you end up with this going after somebody who had. Of the character of Marina Prieto, what did you consider before you ended up with her? And were there conversations internally about, yeah, we could do this. What do you think of this? No, maybe not. And then you end up here. So where were you before you ended up with Marina?

Keith Browning (20:39)

The brilliance in David was that they had around four different creative paths. We had one about a major debate we wanted to spark about tortilla here in Spain. The tortilla is very polemic because some people say it goes with onion and some people say original tortilla is without onion. So we wanted to spark a national debate with that. There was another idea, if I don't remember incorrectly, that we wanted to start sort of with the Metro's Lost and Found storage because it's full of things you wouldn't imagine, sort of like the Amazon of Metro for lost and Found and just put a pricing on everything and just sell the weirdest thing in the Lost and Found or reunite people with their stock through our media and a landing portal. That one was pretty interesting as well. We had then Marina as the influencer and it might have been those three or May. Yeah. And there was a fourth one which was to give the spaces to a national broadcaster that's called Broncano. We'll give you his name bio later if you want to reference it. But it was to give the spaces to Broncano and just this guy's really, let's say, explosive and very, very popular. Massively popular in Spain and in Madrid. So anything he would do with it, we would ask through social media indirectly to him to take over the spaces in Metro and just challenge him to do something interesting if he was able to like from, from that challenging perspective. So of course he was going to make a big event out of it. So that was another idea. But it had a very high risk of being something, well, let's say maybe untasteful, we don't know because he could have used the media for truck value only. No, so that.

Fergus O'Carroll (22:39)

So those are. Those are four. Those are four really strong ideas. I mean, how do you then get from. And you know, in my mind, maybe Marina Prieto was the least obvious in terms of what could be really successful.

Daniela Bombinato (22:55)

Yeah. Because actually if you think those. This is a little bit how David works, you know, I mean, you have the objective of generating conversations, kind of bringing visibility to the brand or to the project. And actually we work on kind of strategic ways in. So, I mean, generating a conversation or a debate about a tortilla with or without the onion, or talking about the, you know, the Lost and Found storage and what you find there, etc. Or giving a space to a media place, just like Ricardo was mentioning. So. And having an improbable influencer was the fourth way to tackle this brief. And suddenly, out of these possibilities of proving the effectiveness of JC Vico, it was unquestionable that Marina was going to do a great work. You know, let me ask you this.

Fergus O'Carroll (23:54)

Because in retrospect that sounds obvious, but I kind of, for my, in my mind, if I think of those four, I'm like, okay, you're going to take an influencer who's not an influencer, a maker. We're going to take a social media user who's not an influencer. We're going to try and make her famous. I'd be like, oh, okay, what's the next one? I wouldn't have immediately gone, wow. So my question is, what made it so extraordinarily appealing? Was it that you interviewed her and just her personality and her joy and her charm made it all seem possible? How, how did you come about that?

Keith Browning (24:34)

Absolutely. At the end when we got the ideas, we had already interviewed her. We were sure she, she, she was aware of what we wanted to do and it was viable. And just the charisma is overflowing. You see it in the post. She's just such a charismatic person that we all fell in love with her to, to be honest. And the fact that I had a 96 year old Galician grandmother, you know, might have something to do with it as well.

Fergus O'Carroll (25:05)

Maybe. So that's, that's the human element, right?

Daniela Bombinato (25:07)

Yeah, I was, I was gonna say that there's something about grandmas in Spain and I can say that because I'm not from Spain and there is this caring, this loving thing about grandmas that they are so proud of their grandmas and their histories and etc. It just, just, it's, it touches you. And so I think this was a very strong element to this campaign, you know, bringing this Galician grandma to the conversation.

Fergus O'Carroll (25:35)

Can you describe what exactly you guys did? What were the images inside of these posters? And these posters, these outdoor posters in the subway, what did they show?

Daniela Bombinato (25:48)

Well, they showed, for example, her sleeping with a napkin on the face, for example, you know, or, you know, she on the phone or she eating, you know, having dinner or having a snack. So very, very, very, very basic stuff.

Fergus O'Carroll (26:11)

You know, and it's, it's, it's actually her posts from social media.

Daniela Bombinato (26:16)

Yeah, it's her post on social media. She was gardening in one. She was wearing, you know, winter clothes clothes or she was in the car with the, you know, very, very Basic stuff, but so lovely, you know.

Fergus O'Carroll (26:31)

And was there a call to action in, in the poster?

Daniela Bombinato (26:34)

No, no, it looked like an Instagram post. It didn't have anything. No call to action, no. No branding, no nothing. And, and that's how people said, you know, what is this old lady in the Metro? So that was the question. What is this old la there? You know, because it was around 54 images. And I think what comes with it is that we also showed the potential of this medium to tell stories because we usually. People usually think of polters in Metro as something tactical or something complementary to a campaign. And actually here there was a story about her being told. People were kind of following her life in the metro. So.

Fergus O'Carroll (27:27)

So you were, you were telling her story at scale. I mean, so there was. So everywhere you went down there, there was always an image of Marina. So people were. It wasn't like a single poster, it was a bunch of posters. 50 odd, you said there. So that's like, what is going on here? And, and then what were the KPIs, Ricardo, that came out of that? What were you then tracking as your key performance indicators?

Keith Browning (27:53)

That was, I think, the best part of it. So just to chime in a little bit on the, on the, on the thing before the post, you would think are really normal, but the brilliant thing and that she did on her own was that all these posts were funny. I mean, you could see her gardening, but she had crutches, so that was pretty interesting. And she was fighting with the crutches in the garden. So that was unique. You just, you could see it. You see it if she was taking a nap, she had a napkin, but she was keeping the napkin on her face with her glasses, so it looked amazing. And she was just resting there in the stand and they all had like brilliant funny captions and Galicians. So what we did is just place, as you mentioned, her posts unedited in unsold spaces in Metro. So we basically amplified what she was already doing. And by that way we told her story and the KPIs. The very interesting thing about the KPIs is that it's the ones that our biggest media competitor provides. So it's not even KPIs that I can get from a biased third party. It's just, let's say the performance KPIs from the Meta portal. So the only thing we were tracking is was Marina getting new followers or not? How quickly she was getting those followers so as to have an average conversion rate of how many people could have access to the campaign as per our industry audience measurement studies and Metro's ticketing data. So we knew how many people per day had access to that campaign, which is how to calculate basically the conversion rate of how many people were entering her profile. And within two weeks we just have 90,000 unique visitors to her profile. So this was a very big KPI for us that we were tracking. Now we wanted to know the conversion rate and out of those 90,000 unique visitors, 11,000 of them became followers. So you're talking about three times the CTR of your standard industry digital campaign, a successful one at that. So.

Fergus O'Carroll (29:57)

Yeah, and that's. Yeah. And you know, when you look at somebody who will become, who, who would take the time. And of course when you're standing there waiting for a train, it's the perfect time. But it's, it's still a lot to expect that people would actually go visit her page and then follow her page. And I'm just curious, did you do any other TR tracking to sort of give you a backup to that either in terms of awareness of the campaign, was there anything, any other layer of research that you did to sort of track effectiveness?

Keith Browning (30:28)

No, I think we were going to do this post campaign.

Daniela Bombinato (30:31)

We did the post campaign. Yeah.

Keith Browning (30:32)

Yeah. But we realized what really was going to sell on the effectiveness of the campaign was not, let's say your average market research toting awareness or broad recall or any of the sorts. It was just the hard sell KPIs because at the end of the day that's comparable to whether an advertiser is going to sell a product or not. You know, they might have above and beyond levels of, let's say awareness or the brand, the brand health tracker might indicate that things are amazing, but if the transaction is not going through, perhaps the marketing mix is not, not adequate or the media didn't do its job with one of the things. Right. So we wanted to be as, as harsh as possible with, with the campaign. So I think we contemplated having market research. But the, regarding, you know, the, the traditional awareness and brand health indicator trackers. Yeah, but the important thing was at the core of the equation was Marina getting more followers where those followers staying with her and were we really, you know, getting, getting those people into her profile or not? And, and the question was yes, basically it was just overwhelmingly positive.

Fergus O'Carroll (31:50)

So the, this leads up to what you mentioned earlier, which was the Effie's gala night. This is where the big reveal comes out. Because while it is in sort of JC Deco's, those physical billboard spaces it has been posted in there. It's not branded as being yours. So the big reveal at the fes, how do you orchestrate that and what's the reaction on FE Night?

Keith Browning (32:16)

Well, that was good because nobody saw it coming. We basically had a three minute, let's say, advertising space where we could either do a commercial for out of Home, we could do a live performance of whatever to entertain the audience. It's just our sponsor Spotlight. And we just went back to David and said, hey guys, listen, as part of the B2B component, wouldn't it be interesting if we could just build the case for the Fes and reveal that we are behind it? Because we already had the major KPIs for the Effies. The campaign took off so quickly. So during the Fes, the funny thing was that Marina was still in the metro, the campaign was still going, but nobody knew anything about it. And actually David had really funny stories about their account managers trying to keep it secret because a lot of people was contacting them and they wanted to know who did the campaign, who was behind it. People thought Meta did it, Google did it. And David had a really, you know this very well, Daniela, but you had a hard time keeping it sort of field.

Fergus O'Carroll (33:24)

Tell us about that, Daniela, then we'll come back to you. Ricardo, because as I understand what I think I'm hearing is that you had entered into that FE Award using this campaign or. No, no, no. Okay.

Daniela Bombinato (33:38)

No, no, no. Yeah, it was last year. We had run the campaign and they had this, this, this sponsorship spot. That's when we relieved that when we released that the campaign of Marina was, was from JC Decol and all the results and et cetera. And what we had was, you know, so many clients of our, of ours and friends from industry asking if we know who it was, who was doing it and et cetera. It was generating some conversation and the team was, you know, just trying to. Not, not to say that. Yeah, just to keep the secret from, from, from the market.

Fergus O'Carroll (34:19)

So when you guys are up there on stage, there's the big reveal and you just say this, you say what? That this proves the ability of X, Y and Z to deliver X, Y and Z. Or what was your sort of. What was the reveal message?

Keith Browning (34:34)

No, the real message was way more tactful because the campaign was still ongoing. So there was no selling point to it. There was no selling line. It was not, look at the media, how effective it is. What we did, what David created was pretty interesting because we created sort of like the typical case you would see at the Fes or Cannes. But the call to action was just follow her, go to the Metro, check it out, be part of the equation. Let's go, let's follow Marina and let's keep it going. Right. And so people were pretty impressed because by that point in time, Marina had already gathered a lot of it, had garnered a lot of attention from the market. And just that night, I think nobody saw it coming, that in the sponsor slots for GI Decoud for the, for the gala, we just came out of left field with presenting Marina Prieto and saying that it was a joint idea by David and Gise Decoud to, you know, to a joint effort to just make this grandmother as famous as possible.

Fergus O'Carroll (35:40)

What are the lessons other marketers should take from this campaign?

Keith Browning (35:47)

Yeah, I think the biggest lesson is to rethink the role of OOH as a whole. Not just, not just Metro or Subway. I'm sorry, not just Subway or street furniture or whatever. Just rethink the way OH can work to the benefit of a cross media campaign. And this is through this priming effect that we talked about earlier. OH is a media that screens out. It does not explain things. So if you work your creativity thinking on two things, on the fact that OH will intrinsically correlate or naturally or organically correlate to mobile media and that you have access to all sorts of audiences because everybody has to leave the home. So you have your centennials, you have the alpha generation. Everyone's in the streets all the time. So the interesting thing is if you take any lesson is take a lesson on perhaps how to use the media. Because if you want to have a lot of messaging and a lot of, let's say, a convoluted message within out of home media, you won't break through the audience, you won't break through the noise. You won't have your audience ready to interact with your message, you know, on digital or on TV or on radio. But if you utilize out to point, to break through that cognitive bias that audiences have and you use it as a catalyst for the rest of your campaign. If you put something really exciting, really fashionable, but not self explanatory, then people will be compelled to some level to understand that a little bit further when they interact with it and when they, you know, when, when they reach, when they're reached by that, by the other tail end of your media campaign, let's say on digital or on TV or on radio.

Fergus O'Carroll (37:34)

So it is the campaign is Marina Prieto, you can go to our website@onstrategyshowcase.com we'll have the films up there in the images. You can check it out. It's just wonderful, wonderful work. So I'm really delighted to have both of you on here today. It's Ricardo Perez is director of marketing at JC Deco in Madrid. And Daniela Bombinato is head of brand strategy at David the Agency in Madrid. Madrid. Thank you both for sharing this wonderful story. It was wonderful to hear it. Thank you so much.

Daniela Bombinato (38:09)

Thanks for having us, Fergus.

Keith Browning (38:11)

Thanks for having us. It was an amazing time. And thank you, Fergus.

Fergus O'Carroll (38:15)

And we will see everyone on the next episode.