Cathay and Standard Chartered Bank launched a new range of Mastercard credit cards with less fanfare than usual, due to COVID. With consumers enthusiastically planning vacations again, Cathay wanted to grow back their market share and drive more card applications with a travel-minded audience in a highly competitive market, while encouraging consumer uptake with the ability to earn Asia Miles in everyday spending with their credit cards. Additionally, in promoting this launch, they sought a partner who could help them manage using multiple DSPs, to avoid overlap and maximize their performance and media efficiency.

Digitas, their agency, collaborated with Quantcast within their tactical campaign layer to drive quality traffic, particularly amongst frequent travellers, and encourage credit card applications. Quantcast’s audience planning tool gave them insight into Standard Chartered and Cathay’s pixel audiences (those who completed a card application) with lookalike modeling to find consumers with similar content interests. Before launch, Quantcast also built custom segments for predictive analytics on campaign effectiveness to help Digitas better forecast performance and manage their budget. To avoid inventory overlap with other DSPs, Quantcast applied exclusions in supply management.

With Quantcast’s first-party data and multi-signal approach, Digitas successfully primed upper-funnel customers, ensuring their client remained top-of-mind as the travel-card of choice. The always-on campaign closed the loop and converted those who showed high intent or engagement. Quantcast’s accurate lookalike models contributed 17% of overall conversion performance and 55% of overall display channel conversions for card applications at a lower CPA. With Quantcast’s contextual targeting, Digitas also gave Cathay a competitive edge in preparing for the cookieless future. With performance results that demonstrated immense value, Quantcast remained part of Digitas’ full-year strategy.