Following our recent Effective Mobile Marketing Awards Ceremony, we continue our round-up of the winning campaign in each category with a look at the winners in the Most Effective Use of Data,  Most Effective Mobile-first Service,  Most Effective CRM Campaign and Most Effective Email Campaign Categories.

Most Effective Use of Data: MGM and Publicis Sapient – PlayMGM
When it came to launching its real money gambling app in New Jersey, MGM was faced with a category filled with a sea of similar apps that often offered identical products, with marketing heavily based on promotions to snare new customers. To distinguish itself, PlayMGM sought a heavy-brand launch campaign that would give its app a longer shelf life than its competitors while also driving market growth and capturing market share.

The team employed a psychographics-first audience strategy, determining behaviours closely tied to online gambling and building four new target segments that were cross-referenced with behavioural signals. The fully-integrated media strategy focused on bringing the glamour and thrill of Las Vegas to New Jersey, with native mobile elements that featured interactive poker challenges.

The ‘Vegas is Here’ campaign drove over 30,000 registrations, outpacing the firm’s forecasts by 74 per cent without cannibalising the audience of existing sister apps. The PlayMGM app jumped to the number two spot in the category, with brand awareness and brand favourability both up by 10 per cent. For its innovative and rigorous use of data, PlayMGM takes the award.

Judges’ View: “MGM blew us away with the breadth of data sources they were using, taking into account mobile, geo, time of day, contextual and their own ad server data, they delivered results that exceeded their expectations.”

Most Effective Mobile-first Service: Merck Animal Health and Creative Digital Agency – My Vet Offers
Merck Animal Health was looking for ways to boost sales and market share for Bravecto, a flea and tick medication for cats and dogs. In the animal health industry, thousands of small independent vet clinics serve as both retailer and brand advocate, making up the single biggest factor for boosting sales, but as each clinic has its own POS system, a scalable mobile coupon integration is all but impossible.

Merck’s solution was to create My Vet Offers, a mobile-first web app build specifically to drive engagement within vet clinics. The web app handled both sides of the mobile coupon experience: distribution for pet owners, and redemption and reimbursement for vets. It offered pet owners helpful automated reminders, and provided vet clinics with a frictionless redemption process, especially compared to time-consuming paper rebate methods.

The program overwhelmingly achieved its goals, with each participating clinic selling an additional 11 doses of Bravecto every day. As well as generating new revenues for Merck and the participating clinics, it also created an all-new end-user database for re-engagement that also prompts pet owners when it’s time for a new dose of Bravecto. The success of the campaign has led to mobile becoming a top priority for Merck Animal Health, which is investing new resources in the area and continues to scale and expand the My Vet Offers program. A worthy winner.

Judges’ View: “A smart, 360 solution that delivered tangible benefits both for participating clinics and pet owners, and has made mobile a top priority for Merck Animal Health.”

There was also a Highly Commended award in this category. This went to The Bridge Digital, News UK for The Times and Sunday Times v-Studio. This is a full-service creative studio designed to produce, publish, and distribute vertical video ads exclusively for mobile environments.

Since launch, v-Studio has secured over a dozen campaigns from both new and regular advertisers generating £250,000 in revenue in the first six months alone – doubling News UK’s video ad revenue.

Judges’ View: “A great example of adapt or die, taking a strategic approach to identify the opportunity, then executing well to deliver a profitable revenue stream, with innovative, location-oriented features.”

Most Effective CRM Campaign: TrustedHousesitters – TrustedHousesitters App
Having facilitated more than 2m nights of house and pet sitting since launching in 2010, the need for a mobile app for the TrustedHousesitters brand had become evident. When designing the app, the company had three main aims: improving communication, ensuring relevance, and introducing the ability to post and share content. The engineering team concentrated on building a best-in-class app for usability, with a design system based on the atomic design methodology.

The launch of the app was supported with an email campaign rolled out over a 24-hour period, with communications tailored to each side of the TrustedHousesitters network. Within 24 hours, more members were live on the app than on the website, and messaging was used to onboard new members and continually drive downloads.

The app hit its download target for 2018 within the first two weeks of release, and currently averages 2,500 daily users and a rating of 4.7 on the app store. While initial marketing focused on existing members, new marketing has expanded to non-members in the company’s CRM database, which has driven a further surge in membership.

Judges’ View: “The results here speak for themselves. The company did a great job of transitioning an engaged audience from one channel to another in two-week sprints.”

Most Effective Email Campaign: Odeon and Adeptiv – Odeon Blockbuster Movie Strategy
Email is an important tool for cinema operators in the run up to the release of a big movie. Most blockbuster releases being are by a film-specific email to their relevant marketable base shortly before the films theatrical release date. The goal of these campaigns is to directly drive revenue via clickthroughs from the email to the booking page of their website.

The challenge is to make these emails stand out, as the core product (the movie) is identical, and cinemas are typically restricted to using the film assets provided by the film distributor. For this campaign Odeon worked with Adeptive to convince customers that Odeon is the best place to experience the blockbuster.

The companies created a series of mobile-responsive, highly-visual, kinetic and interactive email campaigns. Between January 2017 and July 2018, approximately 20 different film campaigns were launched to promote movies including Star Wars: The Last Jedi; Avengers: Infinity War; and Pirates of the Caribbean: Salazar’s Revenge.

It was crucial that the mails inspired the excitement that cinema-goers should feel in the run up to a new release not just for the film itself but the complete Odeon experience. Data inputs such as favoured film genre; previous films watched; and most frequented location were used to segment and tailor the communications.

Mobile users, and in particular iPhone and iPad owners, were consistently seen to be the most significant audience. So to increase the effectiveness of the campaigns, they were optimised to use the advanced features available on these devices (with fallback capabilities for devices that didn’t have full support).

The results of the campaign are confidential, but were supplied to the judges and showed exceptional open and clickthrough rates, as well as revenue and market share increases. Truly, a blockbuster campaign which deserves to take the award.

Judges’ View: “Sound strategy, well executed, focussed on film fandom and engagement, with great results.”

You can see details of all the winning entries here.