Affinity works out how to predict a cough

Affinity realised that it would be very useful for Natural medicine company, Flordis, to know when children are likely to come down with a cough to help advertise its 65-year-old natural cough syrup, Prospan. So the agency set out to work out the algorithm to predict it and, from there, a programmatic buying campaign for Prospan.

Affinity used first party and search data, overlaying it with social, search strings, temperature, pollution and Medicare data to build a cough simulator. It then used a multi-variant regression model to test thousands of factors, whittling them down to the core contributing factors that lead to a cough. An algorithm was then created that could predict a cough and a programmatic buying campaign developed.

The Affinity team discovered that the incidence of cough increased when there was a temperature differential of greater than one standard deviation of the rolling average of the last three months of local weather, logarithmically weighted towards the most recent period.

Or put more simply, a cold snap is all it takes to catch a cough, but how cold that ‘snap’ needs to be differs depending on your location and the recent weather there.

For example, locations with a greater midday to midnight temperature variance like Hobart, needed a drop of two degrees. Locations in Far North Queensland, with much more consistent temperature, could take as little as a 0.2 degree difference for concerned parents to flock to rush in to buy a cough remedy.

But location itself wasn’t the whole picture. If temperatures over the past month had been consistent with a slow curve up, or down, it took next to nothing to get people coughing.

Based on these findings, Affinity built a weather-polling app and set its programmatic buying to correlate with 18 different locations across the country where Prospan has strong product distribution. When the temperature fluctuation rules were met, the algorithm dictated when and where budgets should be minimised, or increased in real time.

Since the campaign launched, it has achieved a click through rate increase of more than 76%, and sales of Prospan’s Children’s cough products increased over an eight-week period by 27% compared to the same time last year.

Luke Brown, chief executive officer at Affinity commented, “We’re realising the promise of data-driven marketing for brands, rather than just talking about it. The combination of creative, intuition and empiric information is formidable when applied to well defined business problems. And it doesn’t demand big budgets or expensive data solutions. It’s about being smarter and outcomes focused.”

The success of the new campaign creates a trifecta for Affinity. Its work for Narellan Pools has won an IPA Effectiveness award and 5 Effies in the last two months.