TELECOM
AI Transformation Brings Results
+122%
Increase in leads year over year
-30%
Lower cost throughout 2018
423%
ROAS
Telenor Accelerates Digital Transformation With Autonomous AI
“Albert as a colleague has given me exactly what I’ve been looking for: real-time optimized media buying and fast, emotionless insights on our media performance. This leads to better strategic decisions regarding the creative our team should be producing. As a result, we have over-performed in both sales and leads, achieving a 30% lower cost compared to the year before.”
- Werner Töniste, Digital Media & Analytics Manager, Business
About
Telenor is one of the world’s largest telecom companies, connecting 174 million customers with mobile, broadband and TV services across Scandinavia and Asia. In Sweden, the company has a mobile network that covers 99.9 percent of the population, with 1/4 of the population already current mobile, fiber or broadband customers. As a challenger brand in the highly competitive Swedish market, the Telenor B2B marketing team was well into a digital transformation strategy, focused on customer centricity and a data-driven lead generation process, when they recognized an opportunity in their media planning and buying activity.
Challenges
While digital ads had been performing acceptably, the Telenor team sought to create a holistic planning /buying and optimization process. Their vision? To create an in-house operational model that built digital media expertise and enabled rapid sharing of campaign insights as quickly as possible with the creative and content team, so they could learn what works for each audience, target group and channel. They knew the solution would involve learning based on actual digital media performance, realtime optimization, attribution modeling, and data collection across all digital channels, brought together in one analytic and execution platform.
Solutions
Like many sophisticated digital marketing teams, Telenor previously did A/B testing. However, it could be time-consuming and expensive when they decided to scale up their testing. At one point, they realized that the optimization of creative would cost them more than they were actually planning to spend on media. Once they started working with Albert, the autonomous AI began running massive multivariate tests as part of the platform’s standard process. Telenor went from A/B testing to A/B/C/D/E/etc.. – testing not just creative, but audience, channels and tactics, all at the same time, within budget and KPI restrictions.
Results
Providing Albert with as much data as possible, the Telenor team immediately benefited from deploying autonomous AI. Albert tests and learns using complex, multivariate calculations at machine pace and scale. The team had to determine their KPIs, set their guardrails, and then let Albert optimize, learning which channel, creative, time and place engaged their customers. Instead of elongated optimization cycles, Albert took on data processing, analysis and pattern discovery, instantly acting on insights. Today, after one year, Albert is very well received within the team and has created a wave of curiosity within the company. The Telenor marketing team’s results have been above expectations and it has given them more time to focus on customers – the goal of digital transformation – instead of crunching numbers.
Read the full case study here.