GSK Australia Puts Digital Video Ads to the Test

Experiment, learn, scale. That’s how GSK Consumer Healthcare Australia tackles innovation in our digital world. Here, Marcos Regalo, ANZ area digital manager, reflects on a year of experimenting with digital video, and shares why marketers should invest their time in testing and learning.

David Ogilvy once said, “Never stop testing, and your advertising will never stop improving.” Those words are practically gospel at GSK.

We test for a simple reason: to keep our finger on the pulse of all things digital. We know that digital is where consumers are, and there’s a real appetite for both understanding digital behaviours and finding new and innovative ways to help our brands establish valuable connections.

Our senior leadership team is passionate about innovation and digital-capability building, which means we’re constantly challenged to experiment and move beyond our comfort zones. Testing is an integral part of this. It enables us to understand what resonates with consumers, optimise media, and plan more efficiently.

Inspired by Google’s experiments with digital video ads, we collaborated across marketing and with our agencies to test just about everything we could think of on YouTube: ad length, format, voiceover, celebrities, retargeting, and storytelling style. Using the Unskippable framework, we learned a few important lessons about creating better digital campaigns—and a lot about experimenting itself.