2020 Award Winners: Grand Prix and Chairman’s Award

The winners of the 2020 Effective Mobile Marketing Awards were announced at a virtual Awards Ceremony last Friday. Over the next few days, we’re taking a closer look at the winner in each category, starting today with the winners of the Grand Prix Award, and of the Chairman’s Award, a special award chosen by Chair of Judges David Murphy.

Grand Prix Award
T-Mobile Netherlands and Velti – Boosting Revenues with AI Campaigns
T-Mobile Netherlands has been running CVM (Customer Value Management) campaigns on Daedalus, Velti’s Artificial Intelligence-based platform, since February 2019. The campaign plan has been designed to engage new customers, support new product and portfolio launches, boost top-up revenue, increase the penetration of bundles and packages, fight customer inactivity and maximize customer engagement and satisfaction.

In this holistic CVM program, Daedalus follows the journey a customer takes from the moment he or she joins T-Mobile, to the moment they become an active and loyal customer, and then until the moment they tend to stop using the service and become inactive.

The journey begins as customers join T-Mobile and get connected. At that stage, Daedalus targets new customers with the right campaigns to welcome them and get them engaged with the operator. The journey then continues as new customers learn about the T-Mobile’s products and decide which ones to buy. Daedalus machine learning algorithms are used at this stage to propose the right products/offers to the right customers. Once customers have bought the suggested products, Daedalus uses additional promotional and re-engagement campaigns to keep them coming back, while at the same time rewarding valuable and loyal customers when they reach specific milestones.

Finally, Daedalus is used to target customers who seem likely to churn. When customers tend to become inactive, they usually ignore the common promotional campaigns. With Daedalus machine learning algorithms, customers who tend to drop off and become inactive are identified throughout the lifecycle stages, and they are re-engaged and brought back to active status with the right offers.

The program involves the daily data collection and creation of 360-degree customer profiles. A scoring process then defines the Next Best Action for each customer. The campaigns with the highest probability scores are then sent to customers and the responses received are recorded by Daedalus and used to train its algorithms, creating a closed-loop, continuously optimized system.

The program has generated significant value for T-Mobile. The networks sends on average around 1m recommendations per month to its T- customers and has seen very high response rates across multiple campaign types.

To measure the success of the platform, T-Mobile and Velti established a control group which is targeted with the same campaigns, but without AI to inform the targeting. The response rates for the Daedalus Group are up to 236 per cent than the Control Group for top-up campaigns and up to 441 per cent better for cross-selling campaigns.

Judges’ View: “A worthy winner of the top prize, for its attention to detail, use of cutting-edge tech and success in upselling and cross-selling to its existing customers.”

Chairman’s Award
McDonald’s and Creata Germany – Superspace AR
At McDonald’s a Happy Meal used to mean a free toy. Now in McDonald’s German restaurants, children and parents can also choose a book, including, in some instances, an AR-powered book. In fact McDonald’s has given away more than 80m books since the program launched in 2015.

Parents and children can access the experience via a free app which, if they don’t already have it, they can download using the free wi-fi in McDonald’s restaurants. McDonald’s and its AR partner Creata say the business goal is to push the sales of Happy Meals, but also to encourage families and their children to read books, using AR to bring the books to life.

The book featured in this campaign, “SuperSpace AR”, brings the planets and the solar system to life in front of children’s eyes through the power of AR. They can watch, transfixed as, firstly, a rocket launcher appears before them and sends a rocket into outer space, culminating in an astronaut leaving the landing module as it touches down on the moon’s surface.

App download numbers were shared with the judges in confidence. They were very good, perhaps not good enough to take the award in the AR/VR category, but the concept of the campaign and the quality of the execution were enough to win it the Chairman’s Award as Chair of Judges David Murphy’s choice as his favourite from among this year’s entries.

Chairman’s View: “All entries in the AR/VR category were outstanding in terms of the quality of the AR experience, but for me, this was the best of them all. For a child to experience the thrill of seeing a rocket take off and land on the moon before their very eyes delivered by this app, must be absolutely spellbinding. A beautiful piece of work.”