Smartly.io: Finnish Railway Operator VR Serves New Routes with Automated Ads

Finnish state railway operator VR runs hundreds of routes across the country. The group primarily operates in Finland, but it also has operations abroad. Its mission is to provide its customers with high-quality, environmentally-friendly passenger and logistics services.

Challenge: Developing Hyper-Local Ad Creatives At Scale

One of VR's most popular ticket products is ‘Säästölippu’ - where a limited amount of discounted tickets are offered for the most popular routes. VR wanted to develop ad creatives that were relevant not only based on the city where travelers were based, but also matched their demographics. Since they wanted each destination city to be featured in each creative, this would have resulted in hundreds of creative variants.

Solution: Smartly.io Automated Ads Enables Scalability and On-Brand Creative

 Using Smartly.io’s Automated Ads campaign feature, VR’s media agency Toinen PHD created multiple ad creative versions - with on-brand fonts, colors and brand-friendly fonts, colors and graphic elements - automatically using dynamic image templates. A product feed was set up to pull all the relevant information featured in the ads and enable scalability of any needed changes. This automatically produced up-to-date product information in the ads at all times, without having to create new ad creatives from scratch.

Results: Hyper-Local Ads Tailored to Customer Destinations Nationwide

By using the Automated Ads campaign type and Dynamic Image Templates, Toinen PHD was able to produce multiple creatives at scale in the time taken to create one. They were also able to test different iterations of the same core elements for optimal performance. Instead of running a standard creative nationwide, VR was able to better serve their customers by running ads that were relevant to their locations and featured offers best catered to their needs.

“For us this is not only efficient way to do dynamic marketing based on customers needs and locations but also change to test different creatives goaling for optimal performance.”

- Jenna Lehtonen, Social Media Manager, VR