Reconnecting with Television Advertising

Lenovo creates promotional flexibility with Google TV Ads.

How does a computer manufacturer create brand awareness in a critical new market? This was one of Lenovo’s biggest challenges following their acquisition of IBM’s Personal Computing division in 2005. IBM’s ThinkPad was already a bestselling laptop product line worldwide, but the Lenovo brand was virtually unknown outside of China. The acquisition elevated Lenovo to the world’s third largest PC company and Lenovo set out to elevate its brand awareness in the US.

Lenovo began by gradually removing the IBM name from its products, choosing instead to create its own brand presence and identity. They promoted Lenovo branded laptop and desktop computers in large retail stores around the country and focused on large sponsorships, online marketing and traditional advertising to reach its audience. “We are trying everyday to make Lenovo a global brand,” Deepak Advani, vice president and chief marketing officer of Lenovo said. “The core marketing message is quite simple - that Lenovo makes the best-engineered PCs in the world.”¹

Gary Milner, global interactive marketing manager at Lenovo, was hard at work developing and executing the online piece of Lenovo’s marketing plan; for this he turned to Google. “We started working aggressively with AdWords to stimulate direct sales,” Gary said. “The online metrics showed us a clear payoff through increased traffic to our site, and we were able to quickly determine what messages and promotions customers were responding to,” he recalls.

As the Lenovo team became more skilled in applying these metrics to better measure and improve the success of its online marketing initiatives, the team began looking for ways to extend their reach through other forms of media. The Google TV Ads product was intriguing because it offered the measurement and accountability of online.

The Power of Sight, Sound and Motion

At the 2006 Winter Olympics, Lenovo used television advertising to generate brand awareness and drive sales. Right away Lenovo understood the power of television but didn’t have the budget to make it a permanent part of their marketing mix. “We saw right away that we got huge spikes in online traffic after that campaign, so we knew that TV was working for us. But at the time it proved to be a very hard medium for us to work with in a scalable way,” Gary remembers.

When Gary and his team were introduced to the Google TV Ads platform, they were excited to see that many of the limitations that had kept them from using television more extensively were addressed. Google TV Ads’ digital platform allowed for easy campaign set up and management and complete flexibility across 95 networks. “The fact that we could configure and run our campaigns through an online interface was really appealing.” says Gary.

A Variety Show

Lenovo’s goal was to use Google TV Ads to generate interest and sales by offering viewers a variety of discounts and promotions. But which promotions would be most effective and generate the greatest response? Gary and his team were eager to find out. “We worked with an agency to create 50 plus promotional variations of our existing ad which saved us the money and trouble of producing a whole new creative,” Gary explains.

This promotional strategy demanded a level of flexibility that was not available to Lenovo through the standard TV buying process. “Google did with TV what they’d done with search – they put control in the hands of the advertiser. The platform gave us the ability to easily upload ad creatives and change them day-by-day based on our marketing needs.”

“With 50 different versions of our commercial we had a lot of opportunity for experimentation,” says David Barbara, another member of Lenovo’s global interactive marketing team. “Be it free shipping or a 40 percent off discount -- we could swap out any of our promotions as often as we wanted based on which deals we were running or which ads got the best response.” The more comfortable Lenovo got with the system, the more sophisticated their experiments became. David continually adjusted the campaigns to optimize reach and CPMs (cost per thousand impression). “We started to better understand which networks gave us the level of impressions we needed to make an impact.”

Channeling success

In some of their ads, Lenovo featured a vanity URL – ExperienceLenovo.com – developed exclusively for their Google TV Ads. By tracking uptick in traffic to the website, the team learned that TV Ads enabled Lenovo to reach new, qualified audiences. “We found that 68 percent of the traffic to ExperienceLenovo.com was direct, meaning users were typing the URL directly into their browsers. The only way they could have gotten there was if they remembered the URL from the television spots we ran with Google,” says Gary. “Additionally, about 65 percent of people who created a customer account with the site during the time we were running Google TV Ads had never interacted with a Lenovo site before.” This meant that Lenovo was attracting new customers.

Google TV Ads worked so well for Lenovo, that the team had decided to do more of it. “TV advertising has not only brought us increased brand awareness, but it has impacted our success online as well – and Google put all of that within our reach.”

"The Google TV Ads platform gives us a flexible, measurable alternative to network buys,” Gary said, “but most importantly, it lets us control our own destiny.”"

^{1 “Making Lenovo a Global Brand” China Daily, June 22, 2006.}