Objective
Groupon entered the Hong Kong market in early 2011 as one of Asia’s first online group buying portals. The wildly popular couponing solution allows consumers to enjoy heavily discounted premium products and services while enabling merchants and vendors to reach new consumers and sell huge volumes of products through Groupon’s unique group buying model.

Participating merchants in Hong Kong include but are not limited to premium brands such as Pret A Manger, Golden Harvest Cinemas, TurboJET, Starbucks, Häagen Dazs, Maxim’s, Dining Concepts, caffè HABITU, UA, AMC, PizzaExpress, Outback, Bliss Spa at the W Hotel, TONI&GUY Salons, BLT Steak, Domani Ristorante, Cecconi’s, Ding Tai Fung and many more.

The immediate challenge for Groupon HK was to adequately promote its great daily offers in a timely manner. Due to time and resource constraints at the early stage, they would typically produce one set of generic banner ads and run it for an entire twelve months period, resulting in rapid overexposure, ad blindness and low CTR.

The Groupon HK team was looking for a way to drive more impressions on its daily deals, build its customer base and increase CTR without adding production costs.

Execution
MediaMind proposed the ideal solution for Groupon HK. Using Smart Versioning as a production tool, the team could quickly and easily create varied and fresh ads for its Daily Deals to keep customers clicking. 

Smart Versioning is MediaMind’s integrated dynamic creative optimisation solution, allowing advertisers to automatically create and serve multiple ad versions tailored to the user by geo, behaviour or other anonymous characteristics. Some advertisers are also beginning to use Smart Versioning as a repurposing tool – a way that quickly converts TV video assets into multiple certified online ad versions.

Smart Versioning is also a production tool, slashing the time required to create ads with dynamic components or in this case, to vary ad creative on the fly, changing the image, tagline or URL with a few clicks. 

The Groupon team simply set up a master Run of Site banner template within Smart Versioning and changed out creative elements each day to promote new daily deals or freshen current deals. The banners ran on four publisher sites: Discuss HK, Uwants HK, Sina HK and MSN HK.