If an actionable insight was the analog inspiration for a great campaign, then surely a digital world stroke of genius is driven by data. The B&T Award for Best Data Driven Marketing was born after intense lobbying by then ADMA CEO Jodie Sangster looking to have her organisation at the centre of all great marketing.
In 2023, entrants were asked to address the below criteria.
The jury will be looking for examples of a campaign that demonstrates the in-depth use of data to drive the marketing process with insight into return on investment. Winning entries will do more than focus on postcampaign analytics. They will go beyond the usual data sources or use that data in more sophisticated ways. Credit will be given for how the data was gathered, a demonstration of how the data was used and evidence of effectiveness and ROI. This category was open to both agencies and marketing teams.
As I am sure you will agree, the shortlisted entrants below have played out of their skin to secure a spot in this burgeoning category.
Of course, now that you’re invested in shortlisted entries, why not come along and see who will be crowned the winners at the Hordern Pavilion on Friday 24 November 2023? Early bird tickets are limited so don’t run the risk of paying full price later.
And if you haven’t already, don’t forget to check out the entire short lists for the 2023 B&T Awards here and here.
Catch up also on the B&T Awards shortlisted work here:
- B&T Award For Bravery
- B&T Award for Diversity
- Best Content Marketing Strategy
- Best CTV Campaign
- Best Data-Driven Marketing Campaign
- Best Digital Campaign, sponsored by Twitch
- Best Direct Response Campaign
- Best Integrated Campaign
- Best Media Campaign
- Best OOH Campaign
- Best PR Campaign
- Best TV Campaign
- Best Use of Sponsorship
Below are the finalists with each heading showing the name of the agency, the name of the campaign and then the client footing the bill. The words are as submitted by the entrant.
Captify & M/Six, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor 2023, EA Games
Objectives
– Raise awareness and deliver conversion at scale for the Star Wars Jedi: Survivor game launch across Australia
– Drive consideration and intent with key audiences.
Strategy
Bringing the power of search to the TV landscape by reaching new pre-qualified audiences who showed intent and interest in gaming and tech.
– Game-related Audience: HD Gamer, Generation Z, Star Wars fan
– Interests: Takeout/Food Delivery, Happy Hour
– Moments: Graduation, New credit card
Activation Snapshot
Captify’s award-winning search-powered Creative Studio built various video canvases to drive:
- Awareness of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor and synergy with the wider campaign
- Engagement by encouraging audiences to interact with the creative in various ways i.e. pre-order and order now.
Results & Insights
Captify’s data allowed EA Games to pre-qualify and identify relevant audiences who are truly in-market and high gaming affinity, maximising clients’ TV advertising budgets while reaching the right eyeballs and mid-funnel conversions. This resulted in delivering a 18X Brand Search Uplift for EA’s “Star Wars Jedi: Survivor” brand and its associated terms.
Carat, SEM Value-Based Bidding, Cash Converters
In early 2021, Cash Converters’ (CCV) personal finance division highlighted the need for a SEM strategy reset: shorter-term loan volume targets were overperforming by +60%, but loan advance targets were underperforming by -15%.
The category’s advertising battleground is almost exclusively the in-market media channel of paid search. Media agency Carat was challenged to recommend a solution to meet three objectives:
- Maintain loan application volumes.
- Increase total outgoing loan advances.
- Maintain paid search investment level parameters.
Carat proposed a transition to automated dynamic optimisation via a Value-Based Bidding strategy (VBB) within Google Ads.
‘Transition to VBB’ – easy to say, exceptionally hard to do. This was no quick fix, for the execution was a mammoth undertaking; a long-term, iterative, intellectually rigorous slog. Solving for this data gap required an 18-month commitment to a substantial investment of time, effort, and resources to build, test, troubleshoot, and refine the necessary custom application programming interface (API) and data architecture.
Since activation in July 2022, VBB has driven an emphatic 17-point growth in outgoing loan advances as of May 2023.
Data and metrics are only as valuable as the business outcomes they improve. By delivering an emphatic 17-point growth in loan advances, VBB has proven to be an innovative and clever application of data-driven marketing in the service of driving long-term business growth.
Such undertakings are still rare; few organisations possess the internal willpower to overcome the effort barrier to set up such sophisticated data connections. This was no ‘shiny bauble’ application, and we would argue the more representative for it in promoting the true ongoing business value of the application of first-party data.
CHEP Network, Reverse Auction Award, Samsung
We helped a Samsung sale steal attention on the biggest sales day of the year.
As the biggest and busiest retail moment of the year, Black Friday is also the most expensive from a media perspective – in 2021, Samsung’s CPMs were 400% higher than average.
We flipped Black Friday eCommerce on its head, leveraging an age-old sales mechanic with a twist: Samsung gave customers the power to decide the price they’d pay for its most popular products. We called it Samsung Reverse Auctions.
Unlike a regular auction, each Reverse Auction began with products listed at full recommended retail price (RRP). These prices would then drop back in increments until all items in the auctions had been bid for, or the price reached $1 – whichever happened first.
The campaign was a huge success, stealing attention nationwide and driving 120% of our target for site traffic, up 285% YoY. We leveraged hype generated through the Reverse Auctions and data from the 51,500 (+203% vs. target) registered bidders to drive growth in online traffic and Black Friday sales.
Fuelled by our performance marketing activity, acquired leads massively exceeded Samsung’s sales expectations, with 515% YoY increase in eDM attributed sales. A modest incremental media spend of $186k saw sales increase by $1.34 million, improving YoY ROAS by 196%.
Overall, the campaign delivered a 270% increase in Black Friday revenue compared to 2022, drove a juicy 360% mROI, and goes down as Samsung’s most successful Black Friday yet.
CHEP Network, Flipvertising, Samsung
How do you turn branded content into a game that GenZ, the most ad-skeptical generation, want to play? By using data and retargeting in a creative way. That’s the story of Flipvertising.
As we noticed more and more conversation on Reddit and other platforms about algorithms and how to avoid or subvert them – we used this insight into emerging behaviour to power an entirely new style of data-driven advertising that felt very much the zeitgeist.
By ‘flipping’ the traditional targeted advertising model on its head, we created a competitive ‘internet sport’ where punters actively sought to get targeted by Samsung ads to win the new Galaxy Z Flip4 phone.
To find the winning ad, clue-hunters searched for three specific terms via Google that linked to our films. At first glance, each film was an amusing product demo, but also contained a clue hinting at the next search term to enter the retargeting pool. Whoever watched all three films went into the final retargeting pool and was served the winning ad as a YouTube pre-roll? The first person to find the ad per day, won a new Galaxy Z Flip4.
With such a technical, data-led execution, understanding the impact of extremely small targeting pools whilst ensuring the data integrity and technical requirements to ensure ads fired correctly within the timeframe was an incredible feat of data engineering.
Ultimately in flipping the technology to serve a single advert, we found an incredible creative use of data whilst sending our audience on a free-wheeling exploration of UGC content that celebrated the new Z Flip4 features.
Through a campaign built on knowledge of ad targeting but executed very differently from the norm, we gave our audience the opportunity to experience more content than any traditional targeted campaign could ever have achieved.
Foundation Australia, Success not to be sneezed at, Telfast
The allergy category in Australia is highly competitive, however Telfast set themselves a lofty goal to win the allergy season in 2022 – defined as delivering #1 market share during the allergy season of September – December. This challenge was particularly tough as Telfast is consistently outspent it’s main competitor. If were unable to outspend them, our only option was to out-smart them – we needed a more innovative and tactical approach to make our limited spend work harder.
We needed to find a way to target allergy sufferers in the moments that mattered i.e. when they are experiencing symptoms and need relief.
Our solution was to build a bespoke trigger model that combined a range of data points, including location, weather, wind and topography, to predict when pollen counts would be high and therefore when allergy sufferers would most likely be experiencing symptoms. This trigger then automatically activated and deactivated campaigns across 12 individual geo-locations during those moments that mattered to allergy sufferers.
Against the odds, Telfast was successful in winning the 2022 allergy season – the #1 antihistamine brand for both sales volume and value!
The campaign and dynamic data-driven approach helped increase market share, growing the brand at x1.5 the market.
Mindshare, Using Data To Win The Game For Kayo?, Kayo
Over the last couple of AFL and NRL seasons, Kayo deployed a localised media approach, reaching fans with relevant team creative based on their postcode area.
Previously, we had prioritised high reaching and high traffic areas to build maximum reach and exposure. Now it was time to get granular. We utilised multiple data sources to identify where Kayo’s year-on-year subscription growth was going to come from.
This helped us hone in on the highest opportunity fans, in the highest opportunity suburbs, and identify the optimal time to reach them. As a result, we drove Kayo’s best performance to date.
REA Group, realEstimate™, REA Group
The Australian property market began to slow from September 2022 onwards, with fewer new properties available for sale. Consecutive interest rate rises, coupled with inflation and cost of living uncertainty, has seen consumers delay their plans to sell. These challenging conditions fueled a decline in seller confidence.
In response, realestate.com.au collaborated with Fiftyfive5 to conduct qualitative and quantitative research into key market segments, with a particular focus on understanding sellers and what was holding them back from listing their properties. The objective was to identify ways to inspire confidence in property owners and help to stimulate the property market.
The research showed that the top barrier for sellers was understanding what their property was worth. The data revealed a clear opportunity. There was unmet demand for better and more accessible information for property owners, which contrasted against low awareness for online property valuations as a category.
This informed the strategy to position realestate.com.au as the destination for property owners seeking to understand the value of their properties. The aim was to connect with potential sellers by developing a clear product name and value proposition for realestate.com.au’s automated valuation model (AVM), an existing product which gives property owners a free and instant estimate of their homes value.
In partnership with creative agency Brand+Story, various product names and positions were developed and tested through additional consumer research. The preferred option was realEstimate™, positioned as Australia’s #1 property value estimate.
In a 16-week timeframe, a new product branding solution was developed, supported by a multi-channel, national marketing campaign to launch realEstimate™ to market. In support, significant improvements were made across the user experience, including web and app updates.
Launching in February 2023, the realEstimate™ campaign exceeded expectations and outperformed all objectives, delivering immediate impact against both business and brand health metrics.
The Iconic, Optimising Towards Lifetime Value in SEM: A data-driven approach, The Iconic
Ahead of an increasingly volatile economic backdrop, softening consumer demand and impending changes to data privacy laws, THE ICONIC set out to design an ‘always on’ data-driven campaign that continuously leverages customer insights to nurture long-term relationships rather than mere one-time purchases.
With the overarching objective being to reach a larger pool of high-quality customers and optimise budgets to improve efficiencies, we built an in-house data-driven learning system that leverages first and third-party data to better understand customers and autonomously make well-informed decisions regarding user targeting, messaging, placement, and timing.
This data-driven approach sets THE ICONIC apart, enabling us to prioritise long-term relationships with high-value customers and leverage the predictive attributes provided by the model to optimise towards lifetime value.
To date the campaign has delivered outstanding results, surpassing goals and driving remarkable growth across sales, ROAS, customer acquisition, average basket size and order frequency. These improvements not only signify our accomplishment in exceeding short-term growth goals but also indicate the positive trajectory we are on in enhancing the quality and engagement of our customer base.
The Media Store, Simply Energy backed by ENGIE, Simply Energy
In a highly competitive utility market with crippling economic pressure on consumers, the knock on effect impacts marketers and ultimately their budgets. There is no room for unaccountable media in such a tightly fought switchers market. With challenges linked to cookie deprecation and IOS tracking prevention; measuring media effectiveness for Simply Energy was make or break. Creating a 2-pronged approach using both multi-touch attribution and market mix modelling we were able to plan, optimize and forecast sales more effectively with outstanding results.
The market mix modelling revealed that the most cost-efficient customer channels for sales were online transactions, tele-sales and the broker channel. The findings also revealed the multiplier effect each media channel had on each other. Specifically, Radio, OOH and search were good multipliers to those customer channels.
We also discovered that continuous flighting of search, video and display provided better sales outcomes. That insight allowed us to re-flight our activity to take advantage of those moments. The major influencing macro factors such as interest rates, inflation and pricing meant, creating a more strategic position for our own pricing and messaging in those environments, but also highlighted contextual environments that we should avoid.
The correlation between awareness and sales gave us insight to conversion rates through the funnel, which provided great comfort to the client on ATL activity
Nothing says success than BEATING SALES TARGETS BY 18.5% with half the budget of the previous year.
Not to mention in November and December achieving the HIGHEST NUMBER OF ONLINE SALES THE BUSINESS HAD EVER recorded and a record cost per acquisition.
Simply Energy closed out the year as one of the leading Tier 2 energy brands.
Thinkerbell, Brewery Duty, Lion
Brewery Duty
Beer tastes have changed more in the last 5 years than the previous 50. Due to slow and expensive R&D, Australian brewers like Lion were failing to keep up with rapidly changing tastes.
So, in order to understand what Aussies actually wanted to drink, Lion enacted Brewery Duty – summoning a nation to register their details and deliver their verdict on different brews to better the future of beer.
With every new trial, those who registered were sent product for review in the mail in exchange for their judgements and insights. This data, direct from the mouths of what quickly became the largest beer tasting jury in the world, created the first-ever live data-set of beer preferences. Brewery Duty effectively future-proofed Lion’s business and gave their brewers everything they needed to continually craft beers to Australia’s evolving tastes.
Wavemaker, Cadbury Christmas, Cadbury
The quintessential hit by American singer Andy Williams ‘It’s The Most Wonderful Time of The Year’ encapsulates the magic of a particularly special festive season – Christmas. For Cadbury, this could not be more apt.
Cadbury’s overarching brand ambition is to celebrate the spirit of generosity. Furthermore, Christmas is a commercially significant period for the confectionery category. This, reinforcing Cadbury’s seasonal range as the ultimate generous Christmas gift is critical for business and brand success.
But faced with a 58% reduction in media budget, we had a big challenge to overcome: How do you substitute the sales-driving engine of TV TARPs with digital impressions?
To answer the challenge, we embarked on a comprehensive data gathering project. Data from a broad range of conventional and unconventional sources led to a pivotal moment in Cadbury media planning. Data informed smarter audience targeting, a digital-only channel combination that could match the sales ROI of TV, and eCommerce plays to deliver incremental growth.
Despite the budget reduction, Cadbury gained share and grew sales by 13% YoY, cementing its category leadership in the most wonderful time of the year.
whiteGREY, The Hope Narratives, Missing Persons Advocacy Network
The context
For every one of the 145 Aussies who go missing daily, there are twelve people directly burdened financially, emotionally, and psychologically.
That burden is called Ambiguous Loss.
Psychologists consider Ambiguous Loss to be the most soul-destroying type of grief because it has no emotional closure. The hardest part for many is how alone and voiceless they feel.
The idea
A system of modular, therapeutic language designed to help people navigate the experience of ambiguous loss, using the lived experiences of others experiencing it. Created with global ambiguous loss expert, Dr Sarah Wayland, and the loved ones of missing persons across 8 countries, The Hope Narratives help people put their feelings into words and know that they are not alone.
The data
Over 100 hours of recorded audio and over 500 responses to written surveys generated more than 500 collective years of lived experience, which we distilled into 145 pieces of modular language. Each one a data point. These connect to become over 1.4 million possible Hope Narratives.
How the data became a tool
The Hope Narratives are a sentence structure consisting of four parts: hard truth 1 > hard truth 2 > coping behavior > hope. Each piece of language works as a modular unit, capable of being combined with all others adjacent in the structure. To achieve this, we took the words of participants, crafted them as units to work within the structure, and refined these until the team of experts felt confident they were therapeutically useful.
How it works for the user
By sequencing the cards, users create sentences that describe the components of their pain, a way of coping, and a hopeful outlook – enabling them to describe their feelings, discover new ways of coping, and feel the power of belonging to a community.
And as always, thank you to our wonderful sponsors.
