This document summarizes several advertising campaigns from 2016 that were featured cases at an IPA Effectiveness conference. It describes campaigns for Narellan Pools in Australia, Spies Travel in Denmark, and Officeworks in Australia. For each campaign, it provides a brief overview of the brand challenges, the strategies employed, and the results and key learnings. Representatives from the agencies involved also discuss the campaigns and outcomes.
2. Participants
Carlos Grande,
Effectiveness Editor
IPA
Soren Christensen,
Partner,
Robert/Boisen & Like-minded
(Spies Travel)
Luke Brown,
CEO
Affinity
(Narellan Pools)
Pieter-Paul von Weiler,
Head of Strategy,
AJF Partnership.
(Office Works)
3. Featured Cases
Doing it for Denmark - a tongue in cheek campaign
repositions a travel brand for new growth
Narellan Pools – a Big Data insight helps turn
Australians from prospects to sales
Officeworks – bringing brand-building and sales activation
together to make the functional emotional
4. Download all the 2016 winning cases
from www.ipa.co.uk/effectiveness
8. Summary of brand challenges
• Stagnating sales
• Declining interest in pool ownership
• Noisy competition from rival brands –
particularly in summer, low barriers to entry
• Two stage challenge – turn around the
decline, then find out what drives customer
sales
9. Summary of strategy
• Research customers and analyse data looking for key drivers
of conversion from lead to sale
• Develop ‘dive-in’ creative proposition
• Identify conversion ‘peaks’ in hot weather
• Invest in predictive weather app
• Implement programmatic media activation/de-activation rules
19. Summary of brand challenges
• Core package holiday market under threat
• Low awareness of Spies activity and city
break offerings
• Need to generate fame plus action (+10%
sales growth target)
• To build on 1st campaign’s success with 2nd
20. •Create provocative, PR storyline about Denmark’s
birth rate and holiday sex
• Use research and scientific experts to leverage PR
• Develop content, tools and offers to turn awareness
into activity (competitions, travel guides, discounts)
• 2nd campaign targeted couples AND their parents
Summary of strategy
31. Summary of brand challenges
• Shrinking market, led by me-too price
offers
• Decreasing brand health scores
• Little emotional connection to consumers
• Needed to meet short-term sales goals
and commitments to promote suppliers
32. Summary of strategy
• Integrate brand-building and sales activation
• Reposition around tighter target audience
• Create multiple executions of idea, ‘If you have the big ideas,
Officeworks has the lowest prices’
• Invest in sponsorships and partnerships around properties
supporting entrepreneurs and small businesses
34. Learning
Combining branding and sales activation can communicate both brand attributes
and a sales call to action. This TV spot was more brand-led.
Hello and welcome to this webinar on learnings from some of the winning international cases from the 2016 IPA Effectiveness Awards.
My name is Carlos Grande, the Effectiveness Editor at the IPA.
And I’m lucky enough to be joined by three authors of 2016 IPA Effectiveness Award-winning cases who have travelled from outside the UK.
So, welcome and would you like to introduce yourselves?
Here are our participants for the session and you can listen to the recording of the webinar here:
https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/1590199854576034563
This session is an opportunity to discuss three very different cases that nevertheless have an attribute in common. All three describe how communications helped a brand overcome some key strategic challenges, with demonstrable results. And we want to draw out as many insights as we can from these examples to help you think of analogous solutions to the problems that your clients – or prospective clients - are facing.
First, we will be hearing from the Sydney-based agency, Affinity, about the case of Narellan Pools. In this case, a Big Data insight was used to identify a very precise set of conditions as to when Australian consumers who had been thinking about installing their own domestic swimming pool were most likely to be converted into actual sales. In the case, a creative and media strategy was put in place to exploit that context in a way that was both effective and efficient.
Next, we will be looking at ‘Doing it for Denmark’. In which humour and a revived brand fame repositioned the Spies travel brand for new growth outside its traditional, core product offering.
And for the final stop tour we are going to loop back to the Australia for the Officeworks case which shows how – contrary to popular industry belief - it is possible to bring together brand-building and sales activation style activities in a way that builds new emotional connections with your consumers, and to do so in a way that creates demonstrable long-term success.
If you would like to ask any of our prize winning authors a question, you can type it at any time during this webinar, and we will endeavour to answer it either while we’re discussing the respective case or at the end.
Obviously, we only have an hour to discuss these three cases today. So don’t forget that these cases and all the 2016 papers – both those that won awards and those that didn’t quite make it – are available in full for download from the IPA’s website.
You will find the link at www.ipa.co.uk/effectiveness. You can also download them from Warc.com, if you have access to that service.
So without further ado, let’s start talking about Narellan Pools with Luke Brown, CEO of Affinity. We’re going to play a very short video summary of the case to give people the broad characteristics of the case and then we will look at the case in more. Does that sound good to you, Luke?
Play the video, found here:
https://youtu.be/_du__nVm_0A
Welcome, Luke.
Change video to use Narellan Pools case study video.
Ok, so quite a lot to take in from the video.
So if we had to summarise the situation we might say Narellan was facing a number of challenges.
There were stagnating pool sales in the Australian market – as a result of trends such as the rise in high density urban living, state of the Australian economy and the decreasing affordability of property. None of which was good news for pool builders and Narellan’s sales had been in decline for several years Due to the same factors, fewer people were interested in owning their own pool.
It was a seasonal market which had been made more congested and noisy by the fact search and digital marketing generally meant there were fewer barriers to entry into the market for new brands.
And this was a two stage challenge which involved first looking at whether the client’s long-established usage of press and TV could be more effectively replaced with digital media, and then looking more fundamentally at what drives customers from being leads for pools to signing on the dotted line of a sales contract.
Luke, have we missed anything out in terms of the challenges?
Can you tell us a little about how you came to be working for Narellan, and what scale of company it is? And traditionally it had focused its media around mass awareness TV and print. Is that right?
So in the first part of your engagement, your task was to change this to emphasise performance marketing.
With good results (+35% rise in sales). But then came the really interesting part of the case, which was when you started to look at more of the fundamental drivers of sales. Can you talk us through how you approached that and how you arrived at the key insight?
So you’ve got the key insight, how did develop the creative approach that would speak to that? And probably the most ambitious element of the approach was how you tied in the media strategy to hit people with the creative only at the time when you believed it was going to be most effective. Talk us through that.
So to summarise, we have got a number of elements in the campaign.
There’s the qualitative research into the customer and the data insight that emerges from when you analyse a mass of difference pieces of data. You have the dive-in creative idea. You’ve identified this pattern that sales peak when the temperature is higher than the mean monthly rolling average for more than two consecutive days.
You’ve invested in a developing a weather prediction app that can forecast when that temperature is going to be the case in each of 49 states and you have developed programmatic media buying to activate your campaign when the temperature falls into those parameters and turn it off when it doesn’t.
And we know it worked from the next slide.
And looking at the charts we know it worked showing how lead conversion rates rose as the campaign was activate after the temperature high and fell back again.
And the overall indexed sales chart at Narellan is the kind of killer chart we like at the IPA. So my question is what does it take to deliver a campaign like this? How important is it to have the kind of access to customer data or the kind of risk-taking relationship you have with Narellan management?
How do you even make an investment of time/resources for the weather prediction app?
Were there any setbacks along the way? How replicable is the strategy by competitors? Have any competitors tried to replicate it?
Marketers are often taught that they need to ensure a brand is constantly visible and/or maintain its share of voice versus that of competitors, or suffer adverse consequences. How do you square that with your more targeted spend approach?
Doesn’t this type of strategy risk neglecting the longer-term benefits of brand-building (which can change perceptions of the brand and generate more customers in the first place)?
Is it dangerous to outperform targets on a reduced budget as a client might seek simply to seek further efficiencies in future at the expense of overall effectiveness?
The full case has the kind of detail which the famously rigorous Effectiveness judges demand. If you do read it, you will doubtless find your own learnings. But here are a few that can applied more generally to other categories and types of brand.
First, understand what converts consumers from leads to sales.
When a brand is operating in a tough or stagnating market, the temptation may be to rein in its ambition and stick to what it has done before. However, focusing on innovation, developing a strategic consumer insight and optimising the delivering of a message built on that insight can deliver a better outcome.
Also, at the IPA we talk a lot about the dangers of seeking short-term performance – at the expense of longer-term brand building – this is quite an unusual case of a seemingly short-term strategy which yielded long-term sales success.
If you use programmatic activation in your media, apply the rules sensitively. Narellan used regional not national data as the trigger to activate or de-activate its marketing activity.
It would also be easy to forget that this was not a case of one size fits only programmatic approach, but one that was tailored to regional variations.
‘Big Data’ works best when it partners strong creative and audience insight.
Big Data may provide a clear solution through a mass of different signals, but campaigns still need a compelling insight into consumers’ motivation and a convincing creative approach to serve up the right message to the right group of people using the right channels.
I think it’s clear even from this brief discussion, that the example of Narellan Pools is quite an unusual case, and I would urge everyone to read the full paper to see what you can get from it.
Luke, is there anything else in terms of a learning from the campaign that you would identify? Anything you would do differently?
Questions for Luke? I’m going to come back to you at the end, Luke, if I may, but for the time being, thanks.
Case 2: Spies Travel.
And we’re going somewhere quite different now – selling city breaks with humour, sex and old people!
We’ve got Soren Christensen, a partner at Robert/Boisen and Likeminded, the agency behind this campaign, to talk us through this.
Ok. Well let’s see the video about the original case.
You can find the video here:
https://youtu.be/l6bjmjmjOaI
To summarise.
The core package holiday market for Spies – as with other brands not just in the travel market – was being challenged by consumer trends and e-commerce.
There was low awareness of the other activities the brand was involved in (such as city breaks and activity holidays).
You needed to generate not just fame but immediate activity. And once the first campaign was a success you needed to build on it with a follow-up.
Were there any other challenges you faced Soren?
So to summarise the strategy.
You opted to create a provocative, PR-friendly storyline about Denmark’s birth rate and the desire of Danes to have sex on holiday.
You used research into travellers’ motivations and science around behaviour to leverage the PR.
The campaign created content, such as travel guides, and mechanisms such as competitions and discounted offers, to turn awareness into activity (i.e. Travel bookings).
Then following the success of the first campaign, which was aimed mainly at the travelling couples, the second campaign targeted the parents (would-be grandparents) of the couples.
Here in detail is the media plan.
And here is an indication of the results. We can see how the first campaign helped Spies record year on year growth in bookings for city breaks.
And as this slide shows there were two waves of the campaign, with the second building on the success of the first. And again, the full case study gives a lot more detail on this.
Using quite a raunchy approach with a brand as familiar to Danes as Spies could easily have backfired. How did you convince the client to take this risk?
How did you avoid your PR being simply seen as a vehicle to sell more Spies holiday breaks?
Why do you think the second campaign, Do it for Mum, was even more successful than the first? What did you do differently?
Have any other brands copied your approach? Do you think that Spies could "own" this idea?
Is this really a short term campaign, or could you still be using the approach in five or 10 year's time?
What was the hardest part of the campaign to evaluate and why?
To summarise our learnings.
The Spies case demonstrates the importance of researching the emotional needs that your brand can credibly address. For instance, holiday’s can ‘recharge’ people’s batteries and give partners opportunities for intimacy.
The second learning is that this campaign was quite risky and could have gone horribly wrong, but the humour is well judged and keeps it from being sleazy.
For fame-building campaigns, it is useful to thing about the audience and where it gets its content and influence from. In the case of the Danish brand, Spies, it was important that the PR reached international outlets and not just Danish media as international media would also influence the behaviour of Danes.
Build on success. The IPA Databank is full of examples of brands that successfully exploited an initial success and built it into long-term branding benefits. Spies is one of those cases.
Our third case features the Australian business supplies retailer, Officeworks.
Welcome Pieter-Paul von Weiler of AJF Partnership.
Let’s watch the video about the case and then discuss it.
Link: https://youtu.be/1fhB8jqvc9o
To summarise the challenges facing the Officeworks brand.
The market was shrinking with many, samey price offers from retailers.
Research found that Officeworks was less preferred, less trusted and its advertised was less well liked than in previous years.
It was seen as a supplier of functional product which had little emotional connection to its consumers.
At the same time, it still need to honour commitments to suppliers to market their products in its advertising and needed to hit – or exceed – its short-term sales goals.
As the video highlighted, Officeworks needed a change in strategy.
It made a number of key decisions.
It opted to retain sales activation-type messages in its ads, but to integrate these with brand-building efforts.
Instead of chasing its traditional broad audience, it defined a new target – Success Seekers – in business, school and their own lives.
Over several years, it aired multiple seasonal executions (around the tax year, the return to school etc.) with a consistent end line, “If you have the big ideas, Officeworks has the lowest prices”.
As well as advertising, Officeworks invested in sponsorships and content partnerships designed to highlight and support entrepreneurs and small businesses.
How did the client decide to move from its usual broad audience target to address Success Seekers?
Was there any initial resistance or concerns to mixing branding and sales activation messages? Did it have implications for the way client and agency teams worked on the business?
As the campaign went on, the messaging had less of an emphasis on seasonal product or price promotions and became more about customer motivations or goals. How did you manage this transition through all the channels Officeworks uses from TV and outdoor to print and catalogues.
Why do you think this positioning is defensible? Has anyone attempted to copy it?
Did anything work less well?
What would you do differently if you had the time over again?
One of the impressive things about the case is that you can show its performance over a long period. Does that make Officeworks unusual amongst your clients in its investment in that type of long-term tracking and willingness to share data?
The results were impressive, showing Officeworks outperforming its sector.
The first learning is that integrating branding and sales activation and achieve the goals of both of these.
Second, find the social or psychological need that your brand can meet and communicate it with personality and emotion. In these examples, Officeworks is tapping into the happiness that reducing your tax overhead might incite and the fulfilment that comes with growing a business.
This case demonstrates the value of tracking effectiveness over an extended period and not chasing a short-term success.
In this example, the long-term evaluation that Officeworks used allowed it to see through an occasional dip in performance, such as in Q 2014 to the long-term positive growth trend.
Finally, once a positioning is established, it is possible to evolve messaging so that it speaks to more specific consumer needs and not just the brand’s guidelines.
Questions from the audience.
All three cases discussed are based on compelling insights. But they were arrived at in different ways, whether it involves Big data analysis, customer psychology or brand strategy.
In your experience, which of these routes delivers the highest quality insights, and why?
In their different ways, these three cases are demonstrations of risk-taking – as are many of the winning cases in the 2016 Effectiveness Awards.
What do you think encourages risk-taking by clients: is it more likely to be argument backed by hard data, gut instinct, or the leadership of a client organisation which supports people even if risks don’t pay off?
What were the hardest/most satisfying elements in your campaigns to evaluate?
Have you been able to apply learnings from these cases in other work you have done for different clients?
The IPA report, Selling Creativity Short, provides evidence that even among award-winning campaigns, there is more a short-term focus and under-investment in media support. Do you find this to be true?
Can you suggest an IPA award winning campaign from the last 10 years which you would like to have written?