iflix Produces Boffo Brand Awareness with RadiumOne

As Asia’s leading streaming and video service provider, iflix touts the global nature of its content—the company focuses on delivering not only the TV shows and movies that Hollywood produces, but also those coming out of big regional entertainment hubs such as Hong Kong, Seoul, and Tokyo. But it’s in a noisy market, and upon launching in May 2015, iflix faced steep competition from large global players such as Netflix; it struggled to improve band awareness and gain subscribers.

To help it do both, iflix turned to advertising platform RadiumOne, which began as a loyalty and rewards program under the name gWallet but today offers online, video, social, and mobile advertising services. iflix enlisted RadiumOne to help it analyze the large volumes of data coming from the web and mobile devices, with the goal of developing a better understanding of consumer intent. Ultimately, iflix was looking to focus its efforts on targeting consumers who were most likely to become paid subscribers.

“Before launching we conducted a global tender to select our tech and data partners. Our primary needs were scale, agility, and the ability to both build our awareness/brand equity while acquiring customers at light speed,” says Mark Britt, cofounder and CEO of iflix.

RadiumOne’s promise is to provide “consumer-powered marketing” by identifying high-value consumers from companies’ paid, earned, shared, and owned channels, as well as throughout the digital world. The company looks at customer data as signals that can help businesses understand consumer behavior and develop their engagement strategies accordingly. Using a three-pronged approach, RadiumOne aims to identify consumer signals, predict customers’ next moves, and then activate campaigns based on that information. The vendor also offers mobile analytics and sharing analytics solutions; the former focuses on consumers’ in-app behavior and the latter on customers’ social media activity.

Working with RadiumOne paid off for iflix—after six months, the company was able to acquire 1 million new subscribers. Additionally, the company increased its brand awareness from zero to 25 percent, reduced its cost of new customer acquisition from $25 to $3, and saw an increase in conversions after quickly re-engaging with users whose subscriptions had expired.

“The biggest surprises were how a programmatic-led strategy could be so effective at brand building and how an ad-tech operator like RadiumOne could play a critical role in aspects such as churn, prediction modeling, and providing lifetime-value insights to inform marketing strategy,” Britt says.

Britt also praises RadiumOne’s ability to help iflix build its subscriptions despite a lack of brand awareness. By using RadiumOne to analyze consumer data both on the web and on mobile devices, iflix was able to effectively target its campaigns. 

The Payoff

After adopting RadiumOne's advertising platform, iflix saw the following results:

• 1 million new subscribers were acquired;
• its brand awareness increased from zero to 25 percent; and
• its new customer acquisition cost dropped from $25 to $3.