Effective Digital Marketing Awards – The Winners (Part 5)

We continue our round-up of the Effective Digital Marketing Awards winners with a look at the winning campaigns in Most Effective AI Solution; Most Effective Entertainment Campaign; and Most Effective Travel & Tourism Campaign categories.

Most Effective AI Solution
Clarabridge – Clarabridge CX Suite
Clarabridge’s customers have vast sets of data, but without the ability to filter that data and extract useful and relevant information, it is virtually useless to them. At the heart of Clarabridge’s CX Suite is AI powered technology that combines natural language processing (NLP), machine learning and linguistic rules. 

In its entry, the company focused on how the CX suite is helping three of its clients. For Dorel Juvenile, whose brands include Maxi-Cosi, Bébé Confort and Quinny, it wanted to delve more deeply into consumer insights as it shifted from a product-oriented organisation to a consumer-oriented one. Dorel Juvenile was already leveraging a number of resources for consumer insight but was finding the data difficult to sort and manage and wanted to find a way to improve this process.

For a large consumer goods company, the challenge was to understand how consumers perceived its brands as well as the brands of its competitors and then use those insights to improve product innovation and advertising effectiveness. The issue was that conducting surveys was both expensive and time-consuming, and if they were run only once a year, they failed to provide a global or timely perspective and could analyse just a small sample of data. The company decided to switch its strategy and look for a social media tool that had the scalability to analyse data across a variety of consumer interaction points and which could be used to share consumer insights across all the individual teams and departments in the company.

For Autodesk, the 3D design software developer, the relationship with its customers is largely defined by the effectiveness of its support interactions. So, the company puts significant effort into understanding that part of the customer journey. It created a customer insights team a few years ago to gauge feedback around the way the company sold its products but needed to make sure product offerings were continuously aligned with customer needs and provide insight for product development and marketing. To do this it decided on a two-part approach, firstly web intercept surveys which could measure satisfaction for the main Autodesk.com support sections and also the community site, and secondly a customer support interaction survey programme which would invite customers to respond via email.

All three companies have used the Clarabridge solution to great effect. For Dorel Juvenile, deeper insights into its customers have had an astounding and positive impact. The company had planned to rename its multi-million-dollar product line but was concerned that sentiment amongst customers was too positive to risk a change. Clarabridge data found that, in fact, consumers rated the product name very low, so the company went ahead with a repositioning and this has since broken every sales record at the company, reduced return rates in one category by 18% and increased sales on the Amazon marketplace by 75% year on year.

The consumer goods company has realised not just a financial saving and a rapid ROI since using Clarabridge but has also driven successful product innovation and advertising effectiveness. The team now makes decisions about ad content, time of release, frequency of release and the platform chosen based on insights into consumer sentiment derived through Clarabridge. In addition, Clarabridge is supporting smaller, but essential projects to understand specific brands. The company estimates that it has saved $3 million in market research since using Clarabridge.

At Autodesk, customer insights are being shared and acted upon at all levels of the business. Insights from customer surveys have led to an increased focus on creating a more cohesive product delivery and seamless product upgrade process. As a result of the company’s CSAT program, some of Autodesk’s top partners have taken on a similar customer centric strategy, making sure low satisfaction ratings are being followed up and complaints are addressed. Autodesk is leading the way in creating an ecosystem of customer empathy which results in customer experience excellence. In addition, the overhauling and improvement of its web-based support has resulted in a decrease in support cases by 9% year-on-year whilst at the same time, customer satisfaction levels have increased. Clarabridge estimates the subsequent yearly savings from reducing case handling are estimated to be in the millions of dollars.

Most Effective Entertainment Campaign
Star Plus and Zapr Media Labs – TGILC and Dance+3 Campaign
Zapr Media Labs’ tech platform aims to bridge the offline and the online worlds. Zapr works in India, enabling brands to target groups who didn’t see their TV ads, on mobile, and to duplicate TV campaigns on mobile at much lower cost, and at massive scale. The platform uses audio fingerprint technology that identifies media consumption in households via Zapr’s SDK, which is deployed across Android users who opt in through apps and publisher partners. These fingerprints are then matched with content across more than 650 channels, so that brands can then reach relevant audiences on mobile.

Here, the tech was deployed by Indian broadcaster Star Plus to recruit viewers to two TV programmes, The Great Indian Laughter Challenge (TGILC) and Dance+3. For TGILC, Zapr and Mindshare India designed and executed a TV-like campaign engaging audiences based on content affinity and specific TV viewing behaviour mapped across the day. It identified the audiences for comedy and reality TV shows, who were most likely to be interested in TGILC. Zapr’s TV-to-mobile tech helped determine these viewers while they watched shows of this type on offline television.

The campaign also targeted people who watched Hindi channels across news, general entertainment, music and movies in the 8-9 pm slot when TGILC would air on TV. These viewers were more likely to switch channels across Hindi content, hence Star Plus had to ensure awareness among these timeslot loyalists.

Consumers were targeted on their smartphones with a frequency cap of two video ad units per user, giving them just the right amount of awareness, without excessively bombarding them with promos.

For dance reality show Dance+3, Star Plus had to win top-of-mind attention amidst the array of reality shows in the Hindi GEC universe, encouraging primetime audiences to switch channels for fresh reality content and convert them into Dance+3 viewers.
To do this, Zapr targeted reality show viewers across Hindi GEC, and also targeted viewers who regularly tuned into the same time slot when Dance+3 would air on TV. This boosted awareness among primetime viewers and increased their chances of switching channels to watch Dance+3 on TV.

Users were programmatically targeted with user-initiated promo videos when they opened any app on their mobiles during the ad run-time.
For TGILC, the campaign served more than 4m impressions in one week. Four out of 10 users who started the videos watched it till the end and the activity delivered more than 170,000 promo-to-show conversions using only mobile as advertising platform.

For Dance+3, the campaign once again served more than 4m mobile impressions, a 45 per cent video completion rate, and 180,000 viewers who switched channels and tuned into Dance+3.

Most Effective Travel & Tourism Campaign
Aruba Tourism Authority and Concept Farm – Aruba Goes Local
Aruba is the most tourism-dependent island in the entire world, with almost 90 per cent of Aruba’s economy directly or indirectly dependent on tourism and many of these tourists coming from Venezuela.

So when the Venezuelan socio-economic crisis peaked in 2016, with 800 per cent inflation Venezuelan visitors to Aruba plummeted by 40 per cent, and Concept Farm was tasked with making up the shortfall by attracting more visitors from the US.  To do so, it wanted to get away from the generic Caribbean diet of sun, sea and sand, and inspire a more emotional, human connection with a more affluent audience, encouraging them to visit the island.

To meet the brief, Concept Farm developed 40 videos of varying length, which were deployed on YouTube and aruba.com, and long format episodes as well as shorter social content. The campaign was integrated across YouTube and aruba.com, and also edited down to bite-size chunks for social media. They were supported by digital ads, native content, social media, eCRM, outdoor, PR, and a 360-degree interactive map. The videos were designed to show Aruba and Arubans revelling in their beauty of people and place with a sense of curiosity and playfulness, and covered local art and music, cuisine and adventure.

The campaign delivered impressive results, with organic and paid social media posts securing 3.3m views and generating 34,800 engagements. YouTube delivered a further 40,000 views with average duration of 75 per cent, against a benchmark of 50 per cent.
Visits from Venezuela fell by 62 per cent between August 2016 and August 2017. Over the same period, visits from the US rose, but only by 9 per cent, However, the more affluent US visitors meant that a 2 per cent decline in tourism receipts between 2015 and 2016 turned into a 3.5 per cent increase in receipts in 2017.

A well thought-out and well-executed campaign that more than met its objectives. This campaign also took the award for Most Effective Content Marketing Campaign.