How Uber used Admix as part of the biggest campaign in their history

In September 2018, Uber launched the largest campaign in their history. Entitled the "Doors Are Always Opening", this $500M campaign was part of the company's effort to break free of a year of difficult publicity and give the brand a fresh outlook. The campaign is upbeat, highlighting optimism for the future and the potentially emotional stories of its services. For this reason, Uber was looking for innovative ways to reach their US audience in an untapped media. The other requirement was to be able to gather new data to quantify engagement to the brand message. Seeing our traction in the VR space, Uber decided to run a 4-weeks awareness campaign using Admix.

Already a client of Oath’s DSP (now Verizon Media) Uber decided to use this DSP to buy VR inventory through Admix, which is plugged into Oath’s DSP through a standard OpenRTB connection. Uber wanted to run Display and Videos on a Private Marketplace basis. They provided standard banners and VAST assets, which Admix is able to use out of the box and optimize live for an optimum view in VR, while reporting clicks, completion and other key metrics as usual. After the campaign was confirmed, we were able to get started in less than a week, mostly due to the fact that we are using standard creatives that Uber had already produced.

Uber gave Admix a lot of flexibility to pick the most relevant VR environments to display their ads. We prioritized driving simulation apps, a flight simulation app and a discovery app. With close to 1M monthly active users across these apps, we could easily achieve the client's target. Uber put in place a daily cap, which we hit every day during the campaign, a testament to the scale of our VR inventory. In addition, we benefited from the pre-Christmas period, seeing peaks of traffic between 5x and 10x our normal traffic!