How AI helped generate a sales turnaround for GSK's Biotène

We recently undertook a campaign for GSK’s Biotène brand. Here’s how it worked, along with the results.

Background 

Biotène, a product line owned by multinational pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline plc (GSK), provides relief for the largely unrecognised but prevalent condition of dry mouth that affects one in four adults. 

Biotène was faced with two key market challenges. Firstly, almost half (43%) of people who suffer from dry mouth are not aware that it’s a medical condition that can be treated. Secondly, only 52% of sufferers believe that dry mouth should be treated with an over the counter product. 

GSK approached Automated Creative to promote Biotène in the US, targeting audiences such as Family Caregivers, Cannabis smokers and people who suffered from dry mouth from adult activities (we kid you not). 

Our aim was to deliver improved sales and media performance for Biotène in the US market, gathering first-party data and discovering new insights into Biotène’s target audience. 

Strategy 

GSK’s Digital Brand Incubator had already run a successful digital campaign for Biotène in the UK, which improved media efficiency and sales, so we took learnings from this from the start. 

AC proposed what was most likely a marketing first - to create ads to respond to every single niche of conversation about dry mouth online in the US. AC conducted social listening into every element of the dry mouth discourse to create a conversation landscape. Typically what would happen here is that a strategist would spot the insight and brief the creative in. We decided to break the traditional mould and automate ads that spoke to every conversation online. 

This created a new kind of challenge for GSK - creating ads that spoke to Cannabis smokers and people who were suffering dry mouth based on their intimate actions with their partner. Not your standard behavior for a large corporation. 

Now we understood how people talked about dry mouth online we were able to put our Creator tool into action. We created all of the ads from scratch using stock imagery and icon graphics. Our machine learning-based Creator tool then continuously optimised the creative assets in-flight, discovering the best performing strategic themes, visuals, copy, overlay and formats to improve quality as the campaign progressed.

We tested multiple hypotheses in relation to strategy, visuals, audience, tone of voice and targeting timings and creative content in real time across all target audiences. In time, we were able to identify the most appealing and impactful themes, along with who were the most engaged audiences.  

Audience insights told us that family caregivers would bring a new purpose dimension to the brand, while light/medium sufferers, such as smokers and the intimacy audience were less interested in Biotène and therefore should be deprioritized. 

Results 

By the end of a two month campaign we were able to definitively tell GSK who their most engaged audiences were on social and which content was most impactful. 

Engagement - 2277.46% Improvement

CPC - 42.10% Improvement 

CTR - 132.85% Improvement

The first party data generated have been used by GSK to inform the next round of creative ideas. This content will be used to target their most engaged audiences using the best performing Visual themes, Messaging Triggers and Language Styles. Attribution results of these campaigns are still pending, but the brand is experiencing a great turnaround in sales since GSK started working with Automated Creative.

“The US CMO was very impressed by the breadth and depth of learnings made through your methodology and challenged his teams to start doing it.”

Prune Page

Marketing Director GSK