Mindset is Making Some Noise. The Results Speak for Themselves.

Mindset, Meet the Metrics.

If you've kept up with GumGum this year, even casually, you've probably noticed a recurring theme: Mindset. Our Mindset approach brings together what people are engaging with, the ad they'll see, and the conditions around each impression to answer two questions: does this opportunity fit your campaign, and how likely is it to deliver your goal? Powered by the Mindset Graph™, that understanding helps brands decide where to show up and which opportunities are worth buying.

Recently, we've opened up more of the intelligence behind it through the Mindset Portal, given marketers new ways to bring mindset into their media plans, and made a pretty consistent case for why reaching people when they're most receptive can change what advertising accomplishes.

And while we're certainly not planning to quiet down, we know marketers have bigger things on their minds. Campaigns to launch. Budgets to defend. Results to deliver. A compelling philosophy is a great starting point, but when real budgets and business goals are on the line, it's fair to ask what that philosophy looks like in practice.

Well, we're glad you asked.

Our recent global survey of 2,072 marketers revealed that 86% of people say Mindset-aligned ads outperform context-only matching. Now, we're following up with something marketers have been asking to see: real campaigns, real results, and a closer look at the decisions that helped make them possible.

And if you're wondering what any of that could mean for your next campaign, you're exactly who we wrote this for.

Let's get into it.

BBC The Celebrity Traitors: 55% year-over-year growth in total audience tune-in with Mindset Targeting

The Plot Twists Weren't Just on Screen.

When the inaugural season of The Celebrity Traitors took British television by storm, viewers had plenty to keep track of: betrayals, shifting alliances, suspicious glances across the roundtable, and a new wave of theories after every episode. For the BBC and its agency Havas, all that delicious drama presented an interesting advertising challenge: how do you keep a campaign relevant when the cultural conversation changes constantly?

GumGum's Mindset approach helped the team follow those changes by combining signals like context, attention, behavior, and engagement to identify when and where viewers were most receptive to the BBC's message.

Powered by the Mindset Graph™, the campaign drew on real-time attention data from more than 20 billion content signals, uncovering strong audience engagement in some unexpected places, including grocery shopping and deals and offers, alongside reality TV content.

But the real plot twist? These insights continued shaping the campaign long after launch. As storylines developed and viewer interests shifted, GumGum used fresh Mindset intelligence to refine targeting and refresh creative every week. Early executions captured immediate attention, while later creative sustained engagement deeper into the ad experience as fan investment grew.

And the results gave us plenty to talk about. The campaign delivered 23% higher average attention time compared with GumGum benchmarks, a 1.07% click-through rate on Mobile Skin units, and 70% viewability across the campaign.

The business outcomes they achieved were impressive, too. The Celebrity Traitors recorded 55% year-over-year growth in total audience tune-in on BBC iPlayer, while its finale drew 53% more viewers than the Season 3 finale of The Traitors. While those figures reflect the show's broader cultural success rather than lift directly attributable to the advertising, GumGum's Mindset-led campaign helped the BBC stay connected to that growing audience and cultural momentum throughout the series.

For a show built around uncovering the truth, there's something fitting about an advertising strategy that kept looking for new clues.

Key Takeaway: Your audience's Mindset can shift long after your campaign goes live. Keep evaluating receptivity, following emerging interests, and using those insights to refine your creative and targeting as the campaign unfolds.

Shabu-yo: 93,457 Measured Restaurant Visits and 8.82x ROAS Means Mindset is Delivering.

A Little Spice, a Little Swipe, and Everything Nice.

As consumers in Japan became more selective about dining out, Shabu-yo had a spicy proposition: its Lamb Shabu Malatang Fair, an all-you-can-eat experience where diners could customize everything from broth to toppings. The challenge? Giving people a compelling reason to try it.

GumGum used its Mindset approach to identify receptive moments beyond traditional restaurant audiences. Strong engagement emerged across unexpected environments, including health, nutrition, family relationships, and household budgets, revealing opportunities to connect Shabu-yo's combination of flavor, flexibility, and value with consumers.

“In previous campaigns with GumGum, we had seen encouraging results in brand awareness, but we couldn’t see how much that was translating into actual store visits. This campaign allowed us to quantify that for the first time and confirm that the advertising we believed in was driving not only brand lift, but real visits to our restaurants as well. That gave us greater confidence in the choices we had made.”

Tomoko Okada
Skylark Holdings, Director of Japanese Cuisine Development Group

The creative brought that experience to life. An interactive Slider let audiences explore milder and spicier versions of the dish, achieving a 1.00% CTR, 233% above plan.

But the biggest payoff came offline. The campaign recorded 93,457 measured restaurant visits associated with GumGum ad exposure and delivered 8.82x ROAS, more than three times the average return of other measured media tactics. The campaign also recorded a +7.8% increase in brand awareness.

Key Takeaway: Your next customer might be found well beyond your category's usual environments. Identify moments of receptivity, make your creative relevant to those moments, and measure whether that engagement translates into real-world action.

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The Mindset Approach Is Delivering Measurable Lift for Marketers

The campaigns above show what Mindset can help accomplish. But there's another part of the story worth paying attention to: what happens after a campaign goes live.

Whether you’re using Mindset segments or contextual targeting, the Mindset Graph helps inform buying decisions by weighting signals across audience, content, creative, device, timing, and auction conditions. Its optimization models learn from recent campaign performance, using data no more than a week old to keep up with what’s working now

And the results are giving us even more to talk about. Built-in control groups compare delivery with and without optimization. Over the past 60 days, optimized campaigns averaged: 

• 57% lift in click-through rate
• 11.5% lift in video completion rate
• 32% lift in converting impressions
• 42% lift in total purchases

And this isn’t just a few standout campaigns pushing the numbers. In the last 30 days, 86% of campaigns optimized for CTR, and nearly two-thirds of those optimized for video completion saw at least a 5% lift.

For marketers, that's another compelling reason to think beyond the initial media plan. Every click, completed video view, or purchase gives the models more to learn from, helping inform the next buying decision.

‍The Next Chapter of Mindset is Already Unfolding.

And marketers aren't wasting any time putting it to work.

In the last quarter alone, teams have used the Mindset Portal to ask more than 9,000 strategy questions, generate 1,300+ audience segments, run nearly 1,000 creative analyses, and send hundreds of segments to activation. That's a lot of ideas getting closer to becoming actual campaigns.

And it's all happening in one place. Teams can start with a question in Strategy Chat, dig into audience intelligence with Signal Grids, explore opportunities through Seasonal Moments, evaluate creative in Creative Planner, and build activation-ready audiences with Segment Agent.

With every question asked and every new opportunity explored, marketers are finding more ways to make Mindset part of their everyday work. And something tells us we're only getting started.

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