When the market leaders in Irish furniture approach you to showcase products that, by their very nature, are all about masterful design and sophisticated style with no compromise, it’s best not to come back with an off-the-shelf response.

For a collaboration between the Irish Examiner and EZ Living Interiors to promote its Autumn Event and Black Friday Sales, we knew we needed to highlight its luxurious range in a uniquely creative and visually engaging way.

As a publisher, our role in the campaign marketing mix is typically at the early attention stage, creating impact and awareness for brand campaign messaging. Driving site traffic for clients is a function of this, but it’s the quality and interest level of that traffic where a strong collaboration between brand and publisher comes to fruition.

In this case, the sleek design visuals provided to us by the client deserved the most innovative formats to display them to our audience and deliver engaged prospects back in return.

A different approach to digital

Our first step was assembly. What we had at our disposal was a wide array of inviting images and short videos of armchairs, sofas, lighting, and dining tables all distinguishable with separate names and descriptions. These were also split across two separate campaigns, so there was a divide-and-conquer approach needed to draw the reader in and showcase their range across a variety of unique ad formats.

Tappable Web stories have been a great resource for us across our suite of news titles over the past year. A mobile-first solution, Tappable has provided us with a platform where advertisers can create visual stories through mobile landing pages.

It has been particularly successful as an e-commerce solution, creating custom browsable product galleries for clients to showcase all their products in one digital booklet. Driving taps, swipes, and conversions for both campaigns, this was a great tool for increasing user engagement with the company’s luxurious range.

Our ongoing partnership with SeenThis has allowed us to provide HD-quality video with instant loading in any display ad unit to maximise performance. The format comes with a significant list of creative and media benefits: adaptive streaming, repurposing existing video assets, zero file restrictions, instant loading, and more.

In this case, it offered the perfect solution for a suite of slick video assets that required more reach and visibility than video inventory alone provides, as well as higher engagement rates than traditional display ads.

Adding to the performance mix, social display through Polar gave EZ Living the opportunity to extend its social media activity across our sites by distributing its social posts as ads in our display inventory. Blending a number of different showroom images across EZ Living’s range, this format required no creative production or lead time.

It was a great “plug and play” option we used to further increase display performance, allowing users to engage with its social channels and drive more landing page visits.

Two campaigns, three formats

Armed with three key innovative ad formats being executed across two campaigns, we finally added creative takeovers of our site home pages, our Property & Home section, as well as first-party audience targeting across five premium Web sites for maximum reach, impact, and awareness.  These included Irish Examiner.com, IrishTimes.com, breakingnews.ie, and Echolive as well as MyHome.ie, Ireland’s leading property portal.

We also ran an event activation, using EZ Living Interiors’ living room furniture as part of the main set in our Irish Examiner Property & Home LIVE Event as well as a competition for an EZ Living voucher to encourage registration.

Optimised for success

Overall, the campaign exceeded expectations, over-delivering on its campaign goals of impact and performance with click-through rates far exceeding industry averages.

In total across both activations, we delivered nearly 2.2 million ad impressions across Irishexaminer.com, echolive.ie, irishtimes.com, breakingnews.ie, and myhome.ie with a variety of contextual and first-party data-led targeting. This yielded nearly 7.5K clicks to the EZ Living Interiors site with an average CTR across all formats of 0.34%,  which is 70% higher than the industry average.

This campaign significantly exceeded all reader engagement targets within the agreed timeframe. That over-delivery is the proof that the campaign delivered on its primary goal — namely, attracting readers to the client site rather than that of any rival retailer, thus ensuring the brand stood out from the crowd.

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