GSK/Sensodyne: Discovering the undiscoverable.

In Turkey, Sensodyne is the leading sensitivity toothpaste and also the value share leader in the market. 

When you are the leading brand, driving growth via penetration is not easy. The growth target for Sensodyne is the Less Bothered Sensitivity Sufferers who do not take any action to treat their condition. Actually, it’s not a small audience, around 40% of sensitivity sufferers are less bothered.   

So here’s the problem. The Less Bothered audience don’t search for solutions online, or go on social to moan about it  - digitally speaking, they are invisible. The challenge seemed unsolvable.

Back in October, we met Automated Creative who had been working across the GSK portfolio. AC’s approach is to turn advertising impressions into marketing intelligence. They do this by creating ads at a huge scale and analysing consumer’s responses to those ads.

AC’s strategy was to leverage the FOMO of the Less Bothered audience whilst not addressing an audience who had tooth sensitivity and were treating it.

So AC started listening to conversations on social media where people complained about the things they missed out on because of their teeth sensitivity.

Then AC automated the production of 1000s of Social and Display ads that said things like ‘you may not have tooth sensitivity now, but if you did you would miss out on XYZ’. 

We knew that driving clicks were not enough. We also needed to understand the brand uplift of the work. So partnered with the pGSK team, Google, Facebook and Lucid to prove the effectiveness and make sure that we weren’t targeting people who already had sensitive teeth.

The Research Phase of the campaign launched to a huge audience in Turkey with 1000s of ads on Facebook, Instagram and Google. We uncovered some fascinating insights about the audience. We have seen that although they were impacted by the same triggers, the way Sensodyne communicates was only resonating with the bothered audience. The Less Bothered audience was drawn to ads that leveraged their FOMO when it came to social occasions.

The Research Phase was incredibly revealing to the brand but there was still the challenge of the Performance element of the campaign - the Insight needed to be put into practice. 

The Performance element of the campaign exceeded expectations and smashed performance benchmarks. But most importantly Sensodyne discovered how to target an audience of the Less Bothereds that were previously impossible to find online.

This campaign has fundamentally changed the way GSK will run media in MEA. The results are staggering.

5X Improvement on the CTR target / Doubled dwell time goal for the website

The new audience were validated by Lucid, Google and Facebook. We had found the unfindable audience of Less Bothereds.

You can see more Automated Creative case studies here.