People are exposed to hundreds of ads daily, and for advertisers, it’s quite a challenge to cut through all this advertising noise.

For this, you must employ solutions that instantly grab visitor attention and encourage them to engage with your ads rather than just scroll past them. 

One of those solutions is rich media, which Stada used to increase its brand awareness.

“Our goal with this campaign with Eskimi was to beat the competition that outsells us,” said Otabek Zufarov, Brand Manager at Stada. “We focused our efforts on impressions and reach, and results exceeded our expectations.”

About Stada

Stada is one of the leading international pharmaceutical companies, which has been growing together with many new generations, or over 125 years already.

Stada’s strategy is focused on three pillars – generic, specialty Pharma, and non-prescription consumer healthcare products. Its products are available in ~120 countries worldwide and often are among the top-selling brands in their product categories.

You might have heard of Zoflora, Grippostad, Aqualot, Nizoral, or Snup, spray for acute respiratory diseases, which is our main focus in this case study.

In Uzbekistan, Stada is represented by NIZHFARM, a part of the Stada Group. Starting from 2023, it will become a part of Stada AG.

To raise awareness and improve the visibility of Snup, Stada AG decided to try interactive Eskimi’s rich media format and benefit from precise audience targeting options.

‍Overcoming advertising challenges

This particular solution – a combination of rich media and the right targeting options – was one of the key reasons for Snup’s campaign success online. 

According to Otabek Zufarov, the company currently faces several promotion challenges related to geopolitical and economic contexts that programmatic advertising has helped to mitigate.

“Russia’s war in Ukraine has affected our work with Meta – since then, it’s much more difficult for us to target our audience,” said Otabek Zufarov.

“Another problem is the rising prices of TV advertising in Uzbekistan, which makes it challenging to buy gross rating points (a standard measure of media delivery in advertising). It’s simply becoming a costly channel despite the coverage being high. 

For the past several years, we’ve been experiencing fast digitalization – the internet in Uzbekistan is not that expensive, and during the pandemic, everyone went online. So every brand is trying to focus on digital, especially mobile traffic, and we’re not an exception."

"Yet, when we started, we needed to figure out how to properly target audiences, what tools to use, what banners and what placements work best. Stada then ran a campaign with DV360, but the CTR was very low – that’s when we started looking for alternatives, which brought us to Eskimi."

Leveraging the best Eskimi solutions

One of the main benefits Otabek Zufarov sees working with Eskimi is its large selection of rich media formats, which gives brands more flexibility and freedom to decide what might work best for particular products. 

“I also like the targeting options Eskimi can offer and insightful suggestions we can get from the team.”

For the Snup campaign, Stada used several different targeting criteria:

• Age – targeting everyone above 25 years old
• Location – all cities in Uzbekistan
• Interest targeting – health (nursing, nutrition, pharmacy, oral & dental care), parents

“I appreciate the transparency that Eskimi provides – we can see the results in real-time and be sure that no figures are drawn.”

The Eskimi report is divided into several sections where you can first see general and daily performances of the campaign and then get more in-depth insights about your audience, including age groups, location, devices they use, operators, top sites delivery, and many more. Moreover, you can examine the performance of each of your creatives.

Otabek Zufarov also added:

“As opposed to another programmatic platform that we tried, Eskimi allows advertising not only in apps but also on the web. This definitely helped us achieve better results.”

Results

The Snup programmatic campaign, which ran during the September-December months, was a part of Stada’s advertising mix (alongside TV and outdoor advertising) that resulted in 5% sales growth compared to the previous year and helped Stada AG fulfill its sales plan for 2022 by a whopping 112%.

The digital campaign achieved:

• 82% viewability
• 0.58% CTR (which exceeded Stada’s primary goal for CTR by 93,33%)
• Nearly 5,5 million impressions
• More than 1,7 million reach