Global competition, local solutions: how to run an international advertising campaign across 22 countries
We managed the selection process across 22 countries, from developing a strategy to attract participants to working directly with the competition winners.
The project was genuinely complex and ambitious for several reasons.
First, the competition targets school pupils and university students. Advertising aimed at minors is tightly regulated by both advertising platforms and national legislation. Each country has its own targeting restrictions and requirements for the format and content of advertisements. Each market required its own campaign segments. When we identified low conversion rates in Tanzania and South Africa, we refined our targeting down to individual cities and created new locally tailored materials. As a result, both countries ranked among the leaders for the proportion of applications that progressed to the competition’s additional stages. A single narrative does not work equally well in Serbia, India and Türkiye: every global project requires a region-specific approach.
We used almost the full digital toolkit: search and display advertising, promotion through messaging platforms and email campaigns. This generated hundreds of thousands of visits to the competition website from more than 30 countries, as well as over 4,000 applications and webinar participants.
Processing participant data presented a separate challenge. Russian law requires organisations to store and process personal data within the Russian Federation, which rules out conventional web analytics services hosted abroad. We built our own technology stack: Matomo on our own server, Yandex Metrica and automated uploads of anonymised conversion data to advertising platforms. This kept participant data within Russian infrastructure while giving us a complete picture of every channel’s performance, allowing us to plan budgets using real figures rather than rely on trial and error.
Every international project depends on the details: legislation, language, channels and data governance. If you are planning a complex campaign for an international audience, we can deliver it end to end and work with you to achieve success.
Viktor Kravchenko,
Director of Digital Communications
