Using Ads For The Better Good During COVID19

Michal Lasman

COVID19 outburst started a global pandemic causing countries to close borders, businesses to either close or go on an accelerating digital transformation process to stay relevant. People worldwide found themselves in self-quarantine. This outbreak has affected most aspects of our lives. Yet, another trend was an increase in fake news and misinformation for various reasons. 

At Kayzen, we did a brainstorming in the team on how we can contribute to the fight against Coronavirus as well as arm people with reliable information. Together we came up with the idea of spreading reliable information using our technological abilities. We created an educational campaign using the World Health Organization information and tailored an ad message which includes video and rich media with clickout to the WHO chatbot in the user native’s tongue: https://play.kayzen.io/video/COVID19/covid19.html

How Did We Decide Which Countries Should We Reach?

We decided to focus on countries that are at high risk of reaching a massive outbreak of the pandemic in Africa and Latin America. We translated the campaign ads into Arabic, French, Portuguese, Spanish to reach users in their native tongue and make the information more relatable and easy to understand. Through the latest news and media, we learned which countries are at the breaking point of the pandemic:

“Africa coronavirus cases could hit 10 million in six months. COVID-19 cases on the continent may shoot up from thousands to millions if models are accurate, UN health agency says”. Aljazeera.com

“Compared to Asia, Europe and North America, the coronavirus pandemic came late to Latin America. But now the region is feeling the full effect on its already stretched healthcare systems and economy”. Bbc.com

It’s been fifteen days since launching #AppsFightCovid initiative and we already reached more than 20 million people, more than 800,000 chatbot sessions initiated and more than 43 million video views. Our goal is to reach more than 100,000,000 people. By now, companies in the mobile apps industry such as AppsFlyer, PubNative, Fyber, AppLovin, Quverse, Fastic and PlaySimple have already donated to our initiative.

“We are excited to contribute to this initiative and believe the campaign message is strong”, said Idil Canal, General Manager at AppLovin. “Mobile Apps are arguably the main medium for information distribution in developing economies. As they will potentially be hit hardest, that’s where help is needed most”, said lonut Ciobotaru, CEO & Co-founder of PubNative. The overall reaction to the #AppsFightCovid was very positive and we owe gratitude to companies and individuals who donated to this initiative.

We are happy to share that we already raised more than $23K and counting. But we will need about 3-4x of that in order to be able to reach 100,000,000 people in these countries – that’s the goal we set for this initiative. All live data can be found on our initiative website, and we encourage you to support our cause: https://appsfightcovid.kayzen.io 

By now our initiative gained traction and was mentioned in three major industry magazines.

MobileMedia by David Murphy, AdExchanger by Allison Schiff and Gruenderszene by Steve Haak.

Michal Lasman
A marketing evangelist and a major data geek. Michal loves cracking marketing briefs and creating funnels. Before joining Kayzen, Michal worked with several startups and B2B tech companies. She is also crazy about coffee, and in her free time is on the search for the perfect Sushi in Berlin.

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