Ancestry.com

Message testing Ancestry’s D-Day 2024 campaign

- BUSINESS GOAL -

Having collaborated on several successful projects in the past, we were approached by the team at Ancestry to support on the development of a major campaign to commemorate the 80th anniversary of D-Day. 

As the largest global provider of genealogy services worldwide, military anniversaries form a major opportunity to reach a wide-ranging audience and spark interest in family history. The team hypothesised that the 80th anniversary was likely to provoke much media interest, marking a pivotal moment in ongoing commemorations of WW2, as many of the final veterans and survivors pass away.

We were engaged early in the creative development process to identify which positioning and messaging would be most effective in encouraging consumers to learn more about the roles their own ancestors played in this historical moment. 

- THE SOLUTION -

We kicked off the project with an internal stakeholder workshop, where we worked in collaboration with the insights and marketing teams to build out several creative territories using our NavBrand framework. Once we had identified these loose emotional drivers, we began to shape messaging headlines that spoke to them and accompanying visual stimulus that brought them to life. 

We then used in-depth interviews to gather insights on consumer attitudes towards, and knowledge levels around, D Day and WW2, before testing the stimulus against a set of benchmarks – i.e. relevance, motivation, interest etc. This allowed us to put forward a clear recommendation for which concepts to develop further. 

Through a quantitative validation phase, we were able to dive deeper into responses to the top-performing creative executions. Helping us to understand nuances between consumer segments, knowledge levels and ages, to further steer the team as they targeted specific groups.

- THE OUTCOME -

"The campaign wouldn't be what it is without the foundational insights the One Picture UK team provided. We're excited to see how it performs."
MIKE, SENIOR MARKETING MANAGER

Through the project, we worked in collaboration with a creative agency and ultimately were able to provide clear creative direction on imagery, language and story focus, whilst showing a direct link between our recommendations and consumer feedback.

The campaign was launched in June 2024 across TV, radio and digital channels. While the full commercial results are yet to be realised, initial tracking suggests it was a huge success for the global Ancestry brand, and it has since been used as an example of best practice for future creative campaigns within the business.

While working on a subsequent project for the 80th anniversary of VE Day, we replicated the metrics we created for testing D Day to show a direct comparison between the two. By repeating the exercise, we hope to build an internal benchmarking library to help predict the performance of future creative campaigns and provide additional reassurance. 

If you would like to know more about this project or are interested in ways we can help you build incredible creative campaigns, reach out to Mich to book in a call or get a copy of our creds deck.