Starbucks rewarded with nma Awards Grand Prix
Starbucks and Manning Gottlieb OMD took the Grand Prix at Marketing Week sister title new media age’s Effectiveness Awards, for Starbucks Rewards, which also won the Best Retail Campaign award.
The 15th nma Effectiveness Awards, in association with Eyeconomy, were handed out at a packed Grosvenor House Hotel after a record 613 entries showed the industry in robust health.
OMD UK was also the winner of Media Agency of the Year, with Saint@RKCR/Y&R winning Creative Agency of the Year, while the Greatest Individual Contribution to New Media went to Laura Jordan Bambach and Alessandra Lariu, founders of women’s networking and mentoring organisation SheSays.
The Starbucks Rewards campaign was aimed at boosting customer loyalty in the face of increasingly stiff market competition. It used Facebook and mobile vouchers, along with various other rewards, to promote new products and build brand engagement for new and existing customers, with a particular focus on existing Facebook fans and loyalty-card holders.
The brand formed a tie-up with O2 Media to launch its first location-targeted advertising, with each cross-referencing their databases to identify common customers, who were then sent mobile discount vouchers. The campaign also marked one of the first uses of targeted geo-fencing by a brand, with targeting areas set up around its 611 UK stores.
As a result Starbucks doubled its Facebook community, taking it to 360,000 fans, while recording 10,150 downloads for mobile vouchers for the free-filter-coffee strand of the campaign on the first day of launch.
The Awards shows broadcasters had a strong year, with ITV, the BBC and Channel 4 winning the Media, Best Entertainment Campaign and Entertainment categories respectively.
Channel 4 picked up its award for cross-platform gameshow The Million Pound Drop Live, developed with TV production house Endemol and developer Monterosa.
The show featured an online playalong game in which viewers at home competed against the TV contestants using virtual money. The answers of the online players were fed back into the show in real time. The game generated a peak of 189,000 players in one night – 8.6% of the TV audience – a figure the judges said was “outstanding”.
Players of the online game, which integrated with Facebook, shared their scores via the social network 83,000 times during the second series, in turn driving a further 73,000 visits to the game. A total of 1.3m people have played the game.
ITV picked up the Media award for its activity for daytime show This Morning, which tied together TV and online audiences. The broadcaster worked with Mydesignclub and Numiko to overhaul the show’s website to feature exclusive behind-the-scenes video and blogs from presenters and experts. To coincide with the site overhaul, ITV launched an interactive studio hub to encourage viewers to get involved in news discussions via the web, mobile, social networks and Skype.
Since relaunch last September, the site has gained an average of 850,000 monthly unique users – a 42% year-on-year rise – with an average of 2m videos viewed a month, up 173%. Facebook fans have risen by over 180,000 to 234,000.
The Best Entertainment Campaign award went to CBBC for The Beakeriser, a campaign aimed at building the online audience around flagship children’s programme Tracy Beaker. With 4T2 Multimedia, CBBC developed an online gaming platform where children can create their own bespoke games and characters, and play a 30-level Tracy Beaker simulation game. This attracted 490,000 plays within ten days of launch, with over a third of the children returning to play the game.
Online fashion retailer ASOS picked up the Best Use of Social Media award for its Future Stylist 2011 campaign, which used Facebook as the hub to build an international community. Influential bloggers competed by styling and photographing a look using ASOS products. Those with the most Likes proceeded to the next round.
With Independents United, ASOS ran Facebook competitions, one of which invited people to pick their favourite ASOS item and post or tweet about it, for the chance to win it. Judges said such an approach to social media and shutting down affiliate marketing in its favour was an “assertive move” and a good example of a brand taking control.
The Best Use of Mobile award went to Nokia for its Nike Training Club campaign. The operator worked with creative agency AKQA to develop a mobile personal training app for women, designed to customise an individual’s training regime. The app notched up 1,813,672 downloads within the first three months of launch, and was the number-one fitness app on the Apple App Store in the UK, US and 11 other countries.
Dennis Publishing scooped Best Media Campaign for its integrated activity around driving subscriptions. The publisher needed to expand its use beyond traditional direct marketing channels to combat depleting conversion rates, so focused on display, co-registration and social media, along with email and offline media, to maximise subscriptions. The campaign’s forecast revenue was over 12 times its cost, with 97% new subscribers and a 52% CPA. The Awards judges called it a “brilliant optimisation of media.”
This story first appeared on New Media Age. For more digital stories and analysis’ from NMA click here now
