ROI-focused TV Campaign Credited with 55 Percent Boost in Registrations
IRCE 2011
HUNTINGTON BEACH, Calif. – For Ancestry.com, 2010 was a banner year for its new television advertising campaign, with home page visits climbing 64 percent and TV-attributable registrations up 55 percent from the previous year.
Ocean Media (www.oceanmediainc.com), a leading independent media planning and buying agency with offices in Huntington Beach and Los Angeles, was the media architect behind the successful campaign. Ancestry.com selected the firm in late 2009 to handle strategic media planning, buying and ad placement for a campaign that would cover the United States and, for the first time, Canada. Ancestry.com (www.ancestry.com), which has been advertising on TV in the U.S. since 2007, is the world’s largest online family history resource with more than 1.4 million paying subscribers globally.
To support Ancestry.com’s objectives, Ocean Media developed a campaign that optimized both national and direct response networks and used its proprietary media attribution software to optimize the campaign by spot length, creative and network performance. Other elements of the campaign included an integrated national broadcast initiative and multi-channel promotions.
According to Lisa Johnson, Ancestry.com’s senior director of Acquisition Marketing, the company’s chief goals for its ad campaign were growth, awareness and ROI – and Ocean Media’s sharp focus on analytics was the key reason for its selection as the company’s agency of record.
“Our guiding principle is that return on investment, or ROI, should be at the forefront of every campaign,” said Mike Robertson, chairman and co-CEO, Ocean Media. “We’re risk averse by nature, which means we bring a disciplined approach to testing, evaluation, comprehensive analytics and optimization.
“Ocean Media’s commitment to analytics, in turn, helps us hone our strategies to reach the right audience and generate results, which has been our game plan for Ancestry.com, just as it’s been for the many online brands we’ve helped build through ROI-driven advertising,” Robertson said. “Since its online launch in 1997, Ancestry.com has done a phenomenal job building the world’s largest online community of people interested in their family histories. At Ocean Media, we’ve been thrilled to have the opportunity to show how we can help Ancestry grow its subscriber base in the U.S. and elsewhere.”
With more than six billion historical records and documents it has digitized and put online along with proprietary online search technologies and tools, Ancestry.com enables its subscribers to research their family history, build their family trees and make meaningful discoveries about the lives of their ancestors.
The campaign’s creative, from Penabrand, tells viewers: “You don’t have to know what you’re looking for; you just have to start looking.”
About Ocean Media
Ocean Media (oceanmediainc.com) is a leading independent media planning and buying agency, founded in 1996 and based in Huntington Beach, Calif., with an office in Los Angeles. Adhering to the philosophy that return on investment (ROI) should be at the forefront of every advertising campaign, Ocean Media develops media strategies that reach the right audience, incite action and generate results. With transparency and a risk-averse focus on continuous testing and evaluation, comprehensive analytics and optimization, Ocean Media has been the media architect behind campaigns that built such name brands as priceline.com (13 years of service), FreeCreditScore.com (12 years), Overstock.com (8 years) and Angie’s List (3 years), among others.
