PERFORMANCE MARKETING · USER ACQUISITION
9 in 10 people who saw a Dove ad in a mobile game watched it all the way through. Then 4 in 100 clicked. Here's what that looks like at scale.
The Challenge
Dove needed to reach women aged 18–44 in Pakistan with consistent, high-quality brand impressions — not just reach numbers. The problem: every major digital format in Pakistan was delivering declining attention quality. Meta Reels play sound-off; YouTube skippable inventory gets skipped at 60–65%; programmatic display is increasingly invisible. The cost of buying an impression was falling, but the cost of buying genuine attention was rising.
Dove's media team and their agency were looking for a format that could guarantee full-video completion without forcing users to watch — and that could deliver the brand's "Real Beauty" message intact, in full, with sound on. That combination of qualities does not exist in standard digital video formats available in Pakistan's programmatic ecosystem.
The additional constraint: any solution needed to reach Dove's core demographic (women 18–44, urban Pakistan) with measurable frequency, verifiable completion, and click-through performance that justified incremental investment above the standard Meta/YouTube mix.
The Solution
Happy Ads proposed rewarded video placements within mobile gaming inventory — the only digital video format where the user opts in to watch in exchange for an in-game reward. No algorithm serves it to a passive scrolling user. The viewer actively chooses to watch. This structural difference changes every downstream metric: completion, click-through, and recall all lift because the attention is voluntary.
We ran two flights: a 17-day pilot in December 2025 ($10,014 investment, 2.5M impressions) to establish baseline performance, and a 44-day sustained campaign from March–April 2026 ($18,143 investment, 4.5M impressions). Both ran exclusively on rewarded video placements within mobile gaming apps — no display, no social, no programmatic video outside gaming. The top-performing apps included Candy Crush Saga (903K impressions, 5.37% CTR), Block Blast! (858K impressions, 4.88% CTR), and Tile Club (527K impressions, 4.20% CTR).
The critical optimisation story happened mid-campaign: on April 15, daily delivery tripled from 63K to 172K impressions. Standard digital media degrades under volume — frequency caps trigger, audience quality drops. On Happy Ads' gaming inventory, the opposite happened. CTR jumped from 1.34% (learning phase) to 5.96% (post-scale) and VTR rose from 89.6% to 91.8%. The DSP had learned where Dove performed best and shifted volume into those environments. The scale-up validated the format's structural integrity at 3X volume.
Key Results
7.04M
Total Impressions (2 flights)
91%
Video Completion Rate
4.01%
Overall CTR
2.77M
Unique Users Reached
Key Insights
01
02
When daily impressions tripled on April 15, CTR jumped from 1.34% to 5.96% (+345%) and completion rose from 89.6% to 91.8%. This is structurally impossible in most digital formats, where scale introduces audience fatigue and remnant inventory. In rewarded gaming video, scale triggers DSP learning — better placement selection, sharper audience matching, higher-quality supply. The implication for media planners: rewarded video gets better when you invest more.
03
Two-thirds of Dove's impressions reached female users. Female 25–34 — the core Dove demographic — drove the highest CTR (5.44%) and the highest completion rate (94.6%) in the campaign. This was not achieved through expensive demographic targeting parameters. The mobile gaming inventory itself — casual puzzle titles like Candy Crush, Tile Club, and Art Puzzle — naturally indexes toward female 18–44 audiences in Pakistan. The brand audience found itself.
