Milieu Insight:
Turning large amounts of data into engaging insights
using personalisation at scale
The backstory
Milieu is an award-winning consumer research and analytics company. It helps businesses thrive in a data-driven world of rapid change, where the need for reliable, quick information to make strategic decisions has never been greater. At the core of Milieu’s business is its data collection app, Milieu Surveys, where people can take short surveys in exchange for rewards, such as mobile credit or e-vouchers. To date, the Milieu Surveys app is used by more than 2.5 million users across 6 countries.
The Milieu team wanted to find a fun, engaging way to allow their app users to revisit and reflect on the opinions and views they shared in the past. We helped them achieve this with our innovative video personalisation engine, voundry.
The core campaign objective was simply to surprise and delight the Milieu app community, which in turn could help drive greater app retention and reduced churn.
The insight
The Milieu team is always on the lookout for new ways to engage with their community of opinion sharers beyond the standard surveys and rewards. The app includes a wide range of gamification features that drive engagement and retention. One example of this is the in-app engagement questions. These are single question polls that, when voted on, reveal how the rest of the country thinks about the topic, and also include a supporting content link that aims to inform or educate users on that specific topic. Beyond the in-app engagement questions, the Milieu content team also publishes articles about the data they collect so readers can learn more about what the data means.
The creative
We knew that our personalisation engine, voundry, would be the perfect solution for reaching the Milieu Surveys app’s large and varied audience in a personal, engaging way. Voundry renders videos and GIFs in almost real time, and can produce anywhere from one to 100,000 unique videos in minutes.
Once all variables from the dataset were finalised, we built a base animation and produced the 8,000 customised videos using the voundry platform. We then launched the campaign by sending out the personalised videos to the Milieu Surveys app users.
Production of the campaign kicked off in June 2021 and it was delivered in December 2021.
The results
*Benchmarks sourced from Mailchimp
The results of the campaign were a huge success. We managed to outperform open and click rate benchmarks, and the community loved the campaign.
The magic
THIS CAMPAIGN HAS WON 2 AWARDS AT THE MARKIES AWARDS 2022!
GOLD: Most Effective Use – Loyalty & CRM
BRONZE: Most Effective Use – Mobile
"Working with the distillery team was a great
experience, and we were immensely impressed with
the voundry content engine. To be able to mass
produce thousands of customized videos in a matter of
seconds was game changing for us, and our mobile
app users loved the campaign. The combination of
distillery's creative expertise and voundry's automation
and processing capabilities is truly powerful."
Stephen Tracy
Chief Operating Officer, Milieu Insight
JustGiving personalised campaign:
Making 30,000 films in a day to raise funds for charity
Fundraising platform JustGiving wanted to help London Marathon runners drive donations right up to race day. We used personalisation technology to create 30,000 films in a day - one for each runner to share on their Facebook page to raise funds all the way to the finish line.
The backstory
Charities are working harder than ever for their causes in the face of challenges like economic uncertainty, costs of compliance, as well as the changing expectations of today’s generation of current supporters - and potential donors. To make matters more difficult (or intriguing, depending how you look at it), Facebook’s algorithm pushes down organic content for brands. JustGiving needed to disrupt the way they engaged online, so we partnered with them to create uniquely shareable content that would activate their fans to raise more money for charities.
The insight
We know that social video generates 12 times more shares than text and images combined - so we decided to take that insight a step further by making videos that weren’t just social, they were personalised to each marathon runner.
Personalisation isn’t just a trend, it’s a demand from today’s content consumers. And that’s not all - this compelling approach also has the power to forge a uniquely deep connection with audiences, appealing to them on an emotional level, and giving them a reason to share, share, share.
The creative
Adding the power of personalisation to our magic formula, we developed a social video campaign that collected opt-in data from JustGiving’s supporters and turned it into 30,000 videos that spoke directly to each marathon runner in a database of 30,000.
Using personalisation technology, we added unique elements to a customised video bed, starting with the marathon runner’s name, JustGiving donation URL, and the charity they were running for, and striking an emotional chord with supportive comments from friends and family that had appeared on the runner’s Facebook page.
The evidence
The brief from JustGiving was to address the dip in donations just before race day, but we’re happy to report that we delivered a campaign that went beyond the brief. Instead of being pushed down, our content racked up over three million impressions. But not just that - the personalised videos also delivered a new reason to get excited about an email from JustGiving. Runners were excited to receive a link to their personalised video, with emails opened over 50% more often. And then shared over 4,000 times on Facebook. Views went up by 30% compared to the previous year; better still, JustGiving succeeded in raising double the funds for its charities.
The magic
We helped JustGiving support their 30,000 marathon runners to raise money for the causes they care about, activating these audiences to share content that they felt was their own. Because the videos were deeply personalised and struck an emotional chord, they helped to strengthen the bond between JustGiving and its current supporters, while winning new fans for the fundraising platform as well.
We were able to create a groundbreaking campaign that changed the social content game for JustGiving - and proved the true power of personalisation. The campaign was a first for distillery, and continues to inspire us to keep raising the bar with social content that’s grounded in insight. Best of all, it counteracted the usual dip in engagement and donations before race day, a first for JustGiving as well.
Are you ready to take your content to the next level with personalisation? Get in touch to learn more about distillery’s personalisation engine.