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
