Case Studies

AI improves key-word relevancy and engagement for NTT Resonant

Customer Challenge

Since its inception of the “Goo” search engine and “Goo Mail” in 1998, NTT Resonate (a subsidiary of NTT Group) has continued to develop and manage a portfolio of internet products and services under the “Goo” brand. While their loyal customer base maintained high levels of engagement, the core user-base was an older demographic that originated from their legacy as a Search Engine. NTT Resonate needed to expand its user base to grow and keep pace with the market.

NTT Resonant wanted to leverage their newly developed “Goo News” app to attract and grow a younger customer base, delivering personalized news and curated content to smart phones on iOS and Android. Through their in-house editorial team and network of syndicated content partnerships developed from decades of experience building content in the Goo portfolio, the Goo News app updated content every 30 minutes from over 3,000 topics spanning daily news to life-hack stories, all contextualized around specific readers. By selecting topics of interest in the App, Goo would curate your personal feed from over 10,000 keywords.

NTT Resonate asked Superdrive to develop a launch campaign for the App designed to drive net-new app-installations from younger audiences without alienating their existing loyal customer base.

Solution

With other news apps, aggregators and curations apps in the market, we needed to uniquely position the Goo News app to not only drive trial, but also sustain usage over time.

Two Paradoxes:

Timely and relevant content delivery was fairly common in the market – whether it be news, sports, lifestyle, how-to-sites, Q&A sites, local or international speciality sites. There was also a need for trending content, that was consistently relevant, delivered immediately, spanning multiple topics and updated constantly. Yet, News and Trend Cycles “shelf-life” was becoming shorter and shorter as audience attention spans were moving almost as quickly as topic or trends appeared.

The competition kept pace by either being a) content publisher that specialized in verticals (news, fashion, lifestyle, Video, etc) or technology vendors that simply aggregate and automate the curation of content. What was not readily available was reliable, high-quality curated local content from a central source across a variety of topics. Publishers could not scale across so many topics with credibility, and technology based aggregators/curators could not keep up with ever changing needs of content in near-real time

A Powerful Capability Revealed

Superdrive’s internal audit across NTT Resonant focussed on E2E operations to identify competitive strengths that would support the consumer value proposition for acquisition and retention objectives.

In addition to Goo’s impressive in-house editorial team, vertical content specialists, and scale of content partnerships that had been refined over decades, we discovered that their solutions development teams had adopted a sophisticated, agile dev-ops process. It allowed for flexible application & system improvements and adjustments that could be implemented almost at real time and at scale. It was the combination of these capabilities that was going to be able to resolve the paradox to develop an editorial, dev-ops and advertising optimization model that delivered news and content across virtually any topic in real time.

On a daily basis, Superdrive selected trending/news (relevant to specific key segments, age and demographics) with Goo’s editorial teams. We then rapidly curated the daily content and messaging against those topics in-near real time. Concurrently, the Dev-Ops team would create and add trending topics & keywords linked to this content within the backend.

User Experience was significantly enhanced through near real-time ads that features themes relevant to their interests. using the AI ​​ad delivery & optimization platform to deliver online mobile, programmatic and keyword advertisement in Google, Facebook, Instagram etc.

Results

The end result was not only a campaign delivery model that created millions of ad variations, optimized in real-time – but also an operational model that enabled the organization to focus on customer-first needs and delivery.

  • 100% of the new app installation target was achieved by creating a total of 135 creative variations across 4 target groups, delivering about 300 million impressions in two months.
  • The refined operations model allowed Goo to deliver the right content to the right target and optimize spend with AI.
  • Conversion rates tripled and cost per acquisition (CPA) dropped 75% as the campaign was optimized.
  • The existing installed user base were also retargeted with the latest trending topics through advertising to encourage lapsed or dormant users to revisit Goo. This tactic proved highly successful in winning back engagement from these audiences.
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