CHANNEL INTEGRATION | UNIFIED MESSAGING:
Chicago Board Options Exchange, in partnership with Stein IAS

Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) is the largest U.S. options exchange and creator of listed options. Awareness, consideration and actual trading of CBOE proprietary products were showing growth, but there was also a segment of traders that was interested in these products but hadn’t traded them yet.

The goal of this campaign was to educate traders about the possibilities and real-time applications of CBOE’s options products across print and digital channels. The strategy was to pose straightforward questions to the investor audience that mirrored their own concerns—based on real-time market needs and interests—and provide answers via CBOE’s products.

An added challenge was that tech required to collect and analyze data in order to inform the messaging and media strategy did not previously exist in a single location—the data lived in disparate sources with no connectivity.

CBOE wanted to examine the relationship of broader market activity to advertising response, and use that intelligence to drive future media planning and integrated messaging. Clickthrough data across all digital display was analyzed by day of week and hour of day, overlaying daily market data for DJIA and NASDAQ and taking into account things like market announcements that might influence decisions. Based on this intelligence, CBOE was able to accelerate impressions (and specific messages) by day and in response to market conditions. Media maps were created for CBOE targets, looking at media channels that index highly at different times of day.

Direct voice of the customer insights guided the multimedia campaign. New ad messages and new content that matched investor questions were rolled out continually, reflecting what users interacted with most. The campaign’s marketing technology stack included Sizmek (ad serving, targeting, reporting), Sharethrough (native advertising), Google Adwords and Analytics (paid search and reporting) and Acuity (programmatic).

The campaign delivered the strongest results of any campaign in the previous four years, including a .31% clickthrough rate. Visitors to the landing page spent on average more than two minutes on the site, and 80% of video viewers watched 100% of the video. Sixty-seven percent of visitors went on to explore more content on the main site.