When Pakistan's biggest haircare brand needed attention that outlasted the scroll, Happy Ads introduced a format the market had never seen
The Challenge
Unilever's haircare portfolio — spanning Sunsilk, Dove, and related SKUs — needed to reach women aged 25–34 in urban Pakistan with a premium brand message. The challenge was that Pakistan's digital landscape in 2024 had become a graveyard for standard formats: banner blindness was endemic, skippable pre-rolls were being skipped at record rates, and social feeds were so saturated that cost-per-attention was climbing while brand recall was falling.
The agency brief, managed through WPP's Mindshare team, called for a format that could command attention at scale — not just rack up impressions. Critically, the brief demanded cross-device influence measurement: did a Connected TV ad on the family television actually drive action on a connected mobile device within the same household? This attribution gap is the unsolved problem of most digital campaigns in Pakistan, and Unilever wanted to solve it.
Pakistan's programmatic CTV ecosystem was nascent. Most brands had never run a single CTV placement. Proposing CTV-plus-Household-Sync as the solution meant building the plane while flying it — and proving that the investment in a new format would outperform the standard playbook.
The Solution
Happy Ads, Pakistan's leading full-stack digital advertising company, recommended the country's first Household Sync campaign for an FMCG brand — running non-skippable 30-second premium ads on Connected TV, then syncing those impressions to mobile devices on the same household WiFi networkwithin a defined retargeting window. The strategy required managing two distinct creative executions: a 30-second brand-first CTV version and a 6-second mobile reminder cut for Household Sync retargeting.
We deployed MediaSmart DSP — our programmatic CTV buying partner — to manage household-level frequency capping and cross-device attribution across three urban markets: Karachi, Lahore, and Islamabad. Our proprietary CTV engagement data from the Pakistan CTV Benchmark 2026 informed the geo prioritisation: Islamabad consistently over-indexes on view-through rates, and that intelligence was applied from day one.
This was not just a media buy — it was a format introduction. Unilever's agency team had never run CTV in Pakistan. Happy Ads managed the full stack: strategy, buying, trafficking, creative adaptation, and post-campaign reporting. The result was a blueprint for CTV investment that has since informed multiple subsequent campaigns across Pakistan's FMCG sector.
Key Results
1.2M+
Total Impressions
95%
View-Through Rate
3X
Household Reach vs Standard Digital
F 25-34
Top Performing Demographic
Key Insights
