How Direct Line is making its advertising work ‘harder than ever’
Michaela JeffersonAmid the rising cost of media, Direct Line is ensuring the continued success of its campaigns with team collaboration and “interrogative” agency conversations.
Amid the rising cost of media, Direct Line is ensuring the continued success of its campaigns with team collaboration and “interrogative” agency conversations.
Having won the Marketing Week Awards Grand Prix for its brand platform last year, Direct Line has launched a new campaign to shift perceptions even further.
Direct Line Group’s ‘We’re On It’ campaign took home the top prize at the Marketing Week Masters, after driving long and short term business impact and surpassing the already admirable efforts of its previous brand platform.
While demonstrating a positive ROI is powerful, as a metric it should be viewed in the wider context of creative effectiveness, says Mars insight boss Sorin Patilinet.
The era of brand and performance as separate and distinct strategies is coming to an end, as marketers rethink everything from media strategy and creative synergy to team structure and semantics.
Brand mascots have largely fallen out of favour in recent years, but marketers should not underestimate their unifying ability to deliver the humour and emotion consumers love.
Despite proving the correlation between customer and commercial, Direct Line Group’s Mark Evans says customer orientation is “not natural to everybody” so the business has to constantly “fight that tide”.
With almost half of marketers having experienced new team structures over the past year, how are brands reorientating themselves internally to fit the demands of the new working world?
While some brands have been forced to ramp up their focus on short-term ROI, others have held their nerve and sustained their commitment to brand building with a view to the world post-pandemic.
While it is important to understand its limitations and resist an obsession with short-term thinking, return on investment remains a powerful metric for marketers when used correctly, says Henkel marketing boss Nikki Vadera.
Brands boycotting media owners and channels over ethical concerns run the risk of being exposed as hypocrites, warns Mark Evans.
Ditching its highly successful ‘Fixer’ campaign for a new creative approach was a risk that Direct Line did not expect to pay off as quickly as it did.
In a turbulent year for the marketing industry, and the world, we look at the people and brands that have been driving change.
Direct Line’s follow-up to ‘The Fixer’ has proven more successful than its predecessor – despite lockdown hitting just weeks after it was launched – showing that investing in brand has both short- and long-term positives.
From the BBC to Ikea and Heinz, the Marketing Week team chooses the first set of eight campaigns that make up our best marketing of 2020.