Client: Visit Norway

Project: Visit Norway Campaign

Channel: Display

Challenge

A holiday in Norway remains low on most people’s consideration list compared to the more commonly visited destinations in Europe. Our task was to create awareness of Norway as an exciting holiday option through digital media.

Strategy

Landscape, our bespoke audience analysis tool, identified that when people are considering their holidays they go to trusted online media environments to investigate destinations in more depth.

Our strategy was to distract people when they are researching other European destinations in popular online travel environments and introduce Norway as an interesting alternative.

Solution

Using ABTA data on UK tourist visitors to Scandinavia, we established a target audience of 30-40 year olds who travel frequently on holidays and breaks out of the UK. Landscape revealed this group to be discerning users of online; very comfortable researching extensively when looking for travel destinations. The advertorial route presented an opportunity to become part of that research process, and by using trusted online media like the Telegraph.co.uk and Independent.co.uk, the content would earn more endorsement from readers than pushing standard online advertising formats.

The campaign focused on different areas of Norway on each site with stunning photography to bring the areas to life.

Performance

The campaign has played an important role in helping put Norway higher up the consideration list of travellers from the UK. The campaign drove a 30% uplift in site traffic directly from the advertorials and achieved click-through rates of over 1% to reflect the high levels of interest in the content amongst the target audience.

Campaign Creative

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Client: Pathe

Project: Adulthood

Channel: Social Media

Challenge

With an aggressive £1m box office target, we had to identify and attract a fresh 16-24 year old audience in addition to the expected traffic from people who had seen Kidulthood, the film’s 2007 prequel.

Strategy

Music has a huge influence on the target urban 16-24 year old audience. Our strategy was to leverage this passion for music and tap in to the viral nature of social media to build credibility for the film, and generate early hype among a new 16-24 audience.

The film had to feel niche, real and about them so the challenge was to talk to them on their level by infiltrating their worlds to give the film credibility.

Solution

Two months before release, we ran a MySpace music competition where people could upload their own tracks with the chance to be featured on the film’s soundtrack. This was supported by ads on specialist music titles and sites and campus targeting to university students.

We then promoted Adulthood in social media on Facebook using a Group Page, a Fan Page and Profile Page. By covering off all three areas we maximised the coverage on the site, turning Facebook in to the perfect environment to learn about the film and discuss its attributes with their communities and friends. We targeted people based on their film and music tastes using text and video ads in their news feeds. Exclusive content was also available on the Facebook pages offering fans and members the ability to view unseen footage and enter competitions only available to them, including an exclusive video commissioned by Noel Clarke inside an Adulthood liveried phone box.

Downloads were made available such as wallpapers and screensavers, and we set up the ability to text ‘Hood’ to 66667 to get the trailer sent direct to their mobile.

Performance

We smashed targets in the first weekend gaining £1,203,319 in the box office! Currently the film has grossed nearly £3.5million.

The Adulthood Fan page generated 23,426 Fans (15,000 in the week leading up to release) and
5,500 trailer downloads via the mobile activity.

In terms of Return On Investment the campaign achieved an £8 return on every £1 invested online.

Campaign Creative

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Client: VSO

Project: Driving Donations

Channel: Social Media

Challenge

A constant struggle that VSO face is the need to raise significant funds each year. A key objective for VSO in 2008 was to put VSO higher up on people’s charity consideration list but with limited marketing budgets, not to the detriment of their volunteer recruitment drive.

Strategy

To simultaneously drive both donations to VSO and to inspire people to want to become volunteers, it was essential to integrate the real experience of a VSO volunteer in to the communication.
Online video provided the opportunity to do this in a highly targeted way, with real scope to generate value through viral interest.

Exclusive video footage of volunteers in the field was created to increase understanding of what VSO achieves.

Solution

Three video MPU’s were created which showed a volunteer teaching in Ghana and allowed people to interact through selecting further footage on the VSO site.

They were embedded across The Times and The Guardian and gave a brief insight into what that particular volunteer was achieving. After the video there was a strong call to action inviting users to visit the VSO website to find out what other volunteers were doing.

The main video creative was used on The Telegraph TV where 100,000 pre-rolls ran before suitable content on the ‘News’ and ‘Culture’ sections. We also used 100,000 post-rolls after each piece of content so as to complete the ’story’ as well as inviting users to visit the site to find out more.

Performance

An average click through rate of 2% was achieved with the pre/post rolls proving most effective. We achieved over 10,000 visitors to the website during this campaign 1% of which gave their payment details to donate.

Although the objective of the campaign was to generate donations, interestingly 35 users inquired about forthcoming projections and 15 users actually applied to volunteer!

Campaign Creative

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Client: T-Mobile

Project: Bespoke Bid-Management for T-Mobile

Channel: Search

Challenge

To grow market share in an increasingly competitive sector by 30%.
The mobile sector has been declining in traffic size since the start of 2008 so our challenge was to buck this trend and deliver our best ever performance.

Strategy

Our strategy was to unlock the potential of high cost non-brand terms by fully understanding their value on T-Mobile’s campaigns earlier in the purchase cycle than just tracking the last click.
We worked with all the data at our disposal to create a modelling and forecasting tool which would then be able to match with daily, weekly and monthly consumer trends.

Solution

By combining the techniques of click-path analysis and time of day targeting we used search marketing to deliver results beyond expectations.

Standard tracking solutions where keywords are optimised manually or through a
bid-management tool only attribute sales to the final click. More sophisticated levels of tracking are also available which assign a weighting to each click in the process based on its position in the click-path.

We felt that neither of these methods of tracking provided the full picture of conversion so BLM Quantum used click-path analysis to attribute a value to each click based on the time-lag between those clicks. This dictated how important that click was in the path to the final sale. An example of this is that a click counted on a generic term 1 hour before the final click made was assigned a higher value than if the click had occurred a week ago.

Having discovered the true value of all keywords in our account we then applied time of day analysis to discover which times of the day were providing the greatest amount of value.
We could then pinpoint specific time slots during the week and analyse them individually. We noticed instances where an ad group may have delivered 1000 clicks at high cost with minimal sales. Further analysis revealed that keywords in this ad group appeared often in the click path that leads to other sales. This insight helped to maintain our sales volume through other keywords by ensuring that we made decisions based on the most detailed tracking possible.

All of the techniques above provided us with three overlapping conversion trends; hour of day, day of week and day of month. We then included results from other online and offline channels. This eliminated any impact that they may have had on search campaigns and ensuring that our model was as accurate as possible.

We produced a forecast by day for each month to predict our performance accurately and then assigned our budget and bids accordingly. A base line was set for conversion rate which would outline when we expected the campaign to perform effectively. For example, our forecasts showed we could expect the conversion rate to be below the baseline on a Friday in the middle of the month. In this case we reduced our CPC bidding in order to maintain efficiency. Conversely we found that Wednesdays at the end of the month were generally above the baseline so CPCs could be increased.

When adjusting bids based on our forecasting we performed optimal positional analysis taking into account clicks, sales, conversion rate and CPC for keywords in our keyword groups. Lowering keyword positions both reduced cost and had a positive effect on the conversion rate while delivering similar sales volume

Performance

Since implementing these techniques we have seen a dramatic improvement in order volume and efficiency.

Comparing campaign results from the same periods in 2007 and 2008:

Spend reduced by 12%
Pay Monthly Orders Increased by 42%
CPA Reduced by 38%

This was by far the best ever H1 performance to date for the search channel.

Campaign Creative

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Client: Haven Holidays

Project: Time Together

Channel: Display

Challenge

Cut through the crowded online travel market-place and put Haven Holidays on top of the consideration list for our target audience of NetMums.

Strategy

Time with the family is the overriding consideration for housewives when it comes to choosing a holiday. They are not overly sophisticated in their use of digital media and when they go online to research holidays, are often faced with so many options it becomes highly confusing.

Our strategy was to create clearly sign-posted content across key online portals to give the researching housewife useful and engaging editorial about holidaying with the family at Haven Parks in the UK.

Solution

To provide a fully integrated solution, meetings were organised between the client and key members of the relevant sites’ editorial teams. Based on these meetings, strategies for each site were established to provide regular editorial on family holidays and locations around the UK with references to Haven where applicable.

The client then worked to supply the sites with weekly updates and regular PR articles in order to provide relevant content of the sites’ users. Moving into the summer, many of the sites built additional features such as diaries for the Summer Holidays and Weather Feeds sponsored by Haven.

Performance

Haven’s online sales targets for the year to (Oct 31st) were hit by the end of the first week in August. To date, online results have shown a 23% increase YoY with over £40 million revenue delivered to date. This is versus a 5% increase in revenue across the business as a whole.

In July, 8 of Haven’s key partnerships were driving a minimum of 1 booking per day and 43% of traffic from the term ‘British Holidays’ in Peak went to the Haven site

Campaign Creative

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Client: Domino’s Pizza

Project: Think Outside the Box

Channel: Social Media

Challenge

Use online media to promote Domino’s commitment to the environment in an engaging way which reflects the company brand values.

Strategy

We took the idea to Domino’s that they could engage with this critical group in a highly positive way by using digital media to raise awareness of Domino’s Pizza Boxes being fully recyclable.

Solution

We created a Domino’s branded user-generated content site on YouTube and MySpace where people could download clips of how they use their box before sending it to the re-cycle bin, with the funniest entrant standing to win an Apple i-Mac. Friends were recruited on My Space and online ads showing multiple uses of the box - from a record bag to a pub drinks tray - were targeted across YouTube, Sky and MySpace around store opening times.

Performance

Over 1200 videos were entered into the site and the winning entrant was hosted for a day on the MySpace home page; securing Domino’s significant added value way beyond their original investment. The content has subsequently been used in the brand’s online activation of the Britain’s Got Talent sponsorship with a UGC campaign to show Domino’s your talent on ITV.com. Critically, sales from Domino’s traffic that came from My Space grew over 29% over the campaign period.

Campaign Creative

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Client: T-Mobile

Project: T-Mobile : My Faves

Channel: Social Media

Challenge

T-Mobile wanted to engage 18 and 22 year old adults with the new My Faves tariff to help build awareness amongst a wider audience profile.

Strategy

The My Faves tariff is competitive for people in regular contact with a fixed group and so it was critical to target people in an online conversational mode.

Solution

Messenger indexed higher than Facebook and Hotmail in terms of usage frequency and so we built a bespoke T-Mobile My Faves game within the MSN Messenger interface based on the old Mr & Mrs game format.

Performance

Over 212,000 game plays and almost 7,000 users were driven through to the My Faves microsite. Advanced reporting was also put in place to track the sales influence from exposure of the display activity on our PPC search campaigns, specifically sales generated off generic terms. The results showed 38% higher conversion from sales where the user had seen both the brand campaign and paid search listings.

Campaign Creative

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Client: MBNA

Project: SEO Step Change

Channel: SEO

Challenge

Search marketing is a vital element of credit card marketing online, and as such the competition for sponsored links is intense, and CPCs have been rising over time. Our challenge was to grow volumes from search at a cost efficient level, by focussing on building traffic and sales from Natural search.

We proposed a Search Engine Optimisation strategy that would take MBNA from poor Natural Search visibility to top positions within the major UK & Ireland commercial search engines, to increase MBNA’s volumes from search at a lower Cost per sale.

Strategy

A phased SEO approach was planned, focussing on longer string keywords at first, to lay the foundations for improving visibility among the most competitive terms such as credit card.

Solution

The project included the reconstruction of MBNA’s core web properties ensuring search-engine-friendly architecture and content.

The third element was to implement an aggressive in-bound link building campaign to build a strong web presence within the Personal Finance sector.

Performance

Google placed mbna.co.uk in the top listing for UK brand searches within four weeks of the technical solution being implemented by US hosting company.

At 6 months MBNA UK hit top positions for the core keyword drivers ‘credit card’ and ‘credit cards’ within Microsoft Live Search 3 months ahead of schedule.

9 months into the 15 month project, MBNA is #1 in Ireland for ‘credit card deals’, #1 for ‘online business credit card’ in the UK, 9 x position #1s for MBNA’s core card and 27x #1s for business credit card across the 3 search engines.

Campaign Creative

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Client: Fly Thomas Cook

Project: PPC Bid Optimisation Tool

Channel: Search

Challenge

In a highly competitive online travel market:

1. To drive maximum flight sales at a low cost per acquisition
2. To prioritise different flight destinations from one week to the next bearing in mind seasonality and availability
3. Realise the potential of generic search terms for each destination

Strategy

We have been dissatisfied with third party bid management tools due to their inability to maximize both volume and efficiency or take into consideration category specific variables. So we decided to create a bespoke PPC bid management system that considered the nuances of the flights market. This solution had to simultaneously maximise volume of bookings and efficiency.

Solution

Conversion rate for Flythomascook is affected mainly by three factors: seasonality, availability and pricing. We created a bespoke tool that looks at the impact of these variables individually for each destination. Each week Thomas Cook’s yield team send through flight data by destination. The tool works with this data and the previous week’s conversion rate and works out the expected conversion rate for the oncoming week.

Performance

Search performance continues to improve YoY:

In 2006 = Every £1 spent delivered £17 in revenue
In 2007 = Every £1 spent delivered £27 in revenue
In 2008 = Every £1 spent delivered £38 in revenue

Campaign Creative

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