When briefed to help drive sales for Prospan, a kids’ cough remedy, last winter, with no real brand presence and a modest budget, we knew we needed to do something special. Our solution: we created the world’s first cough predictor. Rather than competing with pharma-giant budgets to get Prospan’s name in front of mums, research showed our main competitor, was in fact apathy. It seemed most mums were reticent to medicate their children, instead assuming coughs would sort themselves out over time. Through consumer sentiment monitoring, search analysis and primary qualitative research, we discovered a window of doubt open to us: Mums were regularly questioning ‘how long to wait before taking action?’ on online parenting forums.

For our programmatic and social buy, instead of simply targeting all mums, we looked to pioneer the science behind predicting a cough – hyper-targeting only mums who were primed to take action. To do this, we overlayed first party data with social, temperature, pollution and Medicare data, and built the world’s first cough simulator. Our real-time cough predictions then dictated when media budgets should be turned on… and off.

• Click-through rates have surged by over 54%, with cost per click dropping by 67% – drastically reducing media costs and allowing our activity to stretch longer over the winter months.
• But best of all, total unit sales have increased by 27% – proving the power of data is something you just can’t ignore.