iWant, a leading OTT platform catering to Filipino audiences globally, offers a wide range of dramas, films, and original content. With an expanding content library, iWantTFC sought to improve conversion and retention through hyper-targeted messaging and viewer-centric content strategies.
The Challenge: Understanding Granular Creative Impact
IWant consistently released high-performing content, but traditional campaign approaches lacked as we couldn’t tell which specific characters or storylines truly made people watch more or sign up. This felt like a missed opportunity! We wanted a better way to understand what content elements really captured our audience’s attention, so we could create more personalized and effective messages. Our main goal was to find out exactly which character-focused stories led to more subscriptions and kept viewers coming back.
Our Objectives: Data-Driven Personalization
Our collaboration focused on the following key objectives:
- Identify which character-led narratives drive the highest subscription conversions.
- Test and validate character-level impact on engagement, new user acquisition, and re-engagement.
- Utilize data-driven personalization to shape future campaign creatives and targeting.
Our Approach: A/B Testing Character-Driven Variants
We began with a comprehensive campaign performance audit, analyzing character-driven variants in two flagship shows from the lot. A structured A/B testing framework was then deployed:
- Creative Strategy: Messaging was tailored around different character-centric narratives, keeping the call-to-action and format consistent.
- Audience Segmentation: Campaigns were deployed across new, returning, and dormant user segments.
- Channels & Tools: Push notifications were delivered through a marketing automation platform, with cohorts and user behaviors tracked via an analytics platform.
- Performance Metrics:
- New User Acquisition
- Continued Watching Rate (as a proxy for engagement)
- Subscription Conversion Rate (CVR)
Remarkable Results & Impact
The character-led content experiments yielded significant uplifts across key performance indicators:
Metric | Uplift / Multiplier |
Subscription Conversions | +52% |
Re-engagement | 49× |
New User Acquisition | 7× |
Youth-Focused Content Conversion | +26% |
Conclusion: Actionable Insights for Future Growth
This character-level experiment conclusively validated our core hypothesis: specific storytelling elements, particularly individual characters, possess a dramatic influence on OTT user behavior. These findings will directly influence future campaign planning, optimize content investment strategies, and refine audience targeting, ensuring data-driven decision-making fuels their continued growth and engagement.
