The Challenge

Amplifon helps customers find the perfect hearing care solution for their needs. A hearing aid matching their specific hearing profiles can be a gamechanger. Good hearing has a huge impact on people’s quality of life - from preserving cognitive function to promoting a healthy social life.

Under the Amplifon umbrella sits EarPros, a project born in 2019, which generates leads using unbranded campaigns. Unbranded campaigns help Amplifon in targeting different demographics that respond to a diverse set of emotional and functional triggers. This strategy results in EarPros having a lot more flexibility in its communication style: the team can tailor every part of a campaign, from TOV to style to subject, without needing to adhere to brand guidelines.

The Challenge

Given EarPros' particular setup, they have a unique challenge: drive performance without using a brand. Everything in the project is focused on performance KPIs, cost suppression and ROI. Achieving top performing media campaigns means obsessing over optimization. And in today’s digital landscape, with algorithms deciding which ads users should see, the winning element becomes the ad creative. The EarPros team have developed continuous testing processes and growth strategies and, rather than being led by the Amplifon brand, they adapt their campaigns to the market. EarPros focus on the preferences of a particular platform, continuously testing different messages and creatives.

How does this strategy translate into ad creatives? The output has been quite astonishing. Let’s take the example of Facebook, the most popular channel for the EarPros audience: those aged 55+ with a hearing impairment. The ads preferred by that audience, and by Facebook algorithms, are the antithesis of the usual all-singing, all-dancing, slick ads that traditional agencies might propose. 

EarPros wanted to make ads that were completely stripped back. In their words, they wanted ugly ads, but working with a traditional ad agency to make them, proved impossible. The agency teams wanted to make beautiful creatives. Even with the EarPros team explicitly requesting ugly ads, they would have never been able to get something that fit the brief. That’s where Pencil’s AI stepped in: AI doesn’t care if you request something ugly, it'd designed to meet any brief.

A lot of what EarPros wanted to achieve involved generating a ton of assets. For Facebook, ad fatigue kicks in at around the two-week mark, so it's necessary to constantly refresh and rethink creatives. It’s a job that would usually require a twenty person team, but EarPros is a small team with limited time and budget. Pencil would allow them to automate the creative process within a set of rules, so the operational labour could be reduced.

The Creative

By leveraging Pencil's AI, EarPros was able to streamline its asset generation process, which in turn allowed them to quickly and easily refresh creatives. The rapid process allowed them to avoid ad fatigue and test new creatives based on Pencil generated ideas. Adapting to the nuanced preferences of each audience and each channel became more manageable. The team were able to transition from using static images to video-first content, opening up an entirely new format, as well as localizing each ad for various cities across the world.

Pencil's AI automated the creative process and provided invaluable insights and new ideas. EarPros uploaded its assets and Pencil generated new ways to shape creativity based on data from over $1B in ad spend.

“As a team, we’ve explored a number of different AI solutions, but Pencil stood out because of its focus on performance marketing. It created examples and ideas that helped us evolve. It’s a great use case for us, because as a team, we’re driven by performance objectives.” - Matteo Trichilo (Global Head of EarPros)

The Result

“We moved from a 2-week process with the agency to 1 day with Pencil,” Matteo says, “It doesn’t mean we want to stop working with the agency, it’s just changed how we work with them. We still value their creative minds and have partnered on storyboards and more specific storylines which we then shoot with actors. We then give those pieces to Pencil to see what it can create.”

Pencil helped EarPros generate more than 650 creatives over three months, saving 35 days. In addition, the cost per lead was reduced by 8 Euros, saving around 80,000 over three months.