CHANNEL AND CAMPAIGN AWARDS
Best Programme Launch or Migration
PI LIVE London is an annual gathering of the brightest minds in e-commerce, affiliate and performance marketing. Our events are carefully curated and designed with both retailers and publishers in mind giving access to great content, leading technologies and potential partners across two action-packed days.
Our last two events have grown 25% YOY and we invite you to join us once more at Old Billingsgate on 19-20 October 2021.
Winner:
Awin-O, Let’s Go
AO entered into 2020 with a strong focus on increasing brand awareness, growing its customer base and enhancing its digital strategies to facilitate customer’s vision.
The AO group made the decision to move away from its previous SaaS provider, instead deciding to use Awin’s Key Account managed service to help achieve large channel targets. The group successfully launched on the Awin network in November 2020, just weeks before the Cyber Weekend trading period and annual peak. These timings being considered, it was critical for all parties to ensure a seamless migration and that Awin had the best foundations in place to deliver and optimise from the outset.
In the 90 days following the brand’s migration to the network, Awin grew AO.com’s publisher membership base by 84%, directly resulting in substantial YoY revenue growth across the programme and aiding the objective to actively diversify the brand’s publisher portfolio.
Highly Commended:
CJ Affiliate & Sainsbury’s Group – Software WITH a Service: Migrating, consolidating and mobilising affiliate
Highly Commended:
Fuel Affiliate for Sweetzy
Finalists
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Impact, Performics & QVC: An Affiliate Phoenix
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Impact, Silverbean and John Lewis Partnership: A technical revolution
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Migrating Dell to CJ: A high stakes, high pace migration
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Rakuten Advertising & Customer First Digital for Face the Future
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Silverbean & Robert Goddard: Ready for Liftoff
Best Price Comparison Website (PCW) Strategy
Winner:
Awin & TalkTalk – Feel the Churn: Increasing Visibility and Retention in Telecoms
Awin’s data shows that one in three customers acquire their broadband through the affiliate channel, with PCWs holding a large share. Awin and TalkTalk decided to utilise this publisher type for their retention strategy and play it to its strengths; having a large customer base and attracting customers at a key time period during their switching journey.
This approach would allow PCWs to add value by aiding and assisting with retention of customers and to earn on sales outside of new customer acquisition. The strategy also aimed to enable the affiliate channel to grow and find new streams of sales and revenue, while working towards an overarching goal for TalkTalk.
This is the first time that an advertiser has activated an initiative such as this for existing customers. After the initial testing phase of retention deals, expectations were exceeded. There was a 322% increase in the number of TalkTalk affiliate retention sales and £500k+ additional spend into the affiliate channel.
Highly Commended:
Starling Bank & finder.com: Beyond Compare
Best Lead Generation Campaign
Winner:
Fitness Marketing Agency & Elite: Survival Of The Fittest – Building Leads For a Stronger Future
When fitness businesses faced closure due to the pandemic, Fitness Marketing Agency (FMA) pivoted quickly to support training online, build communities, and take on new clients.
Kicking off in June 2020, FMA began working with Elite:, a fitness business, who’s gyms were closed due to lockdown. The pair ran a tightly targeted, highly cost-effective and ethical performance marketing campaign that aimed to sustain Elite: through the challenging times. FMA decided to focus on the market’s desires – to be fitter, feel healthier and be in better shape mentally and physically to fight the pandemic. Customers didn’t want to cancel memberships, they wanted help to train online.
In just 3 months, FMA collectively generated £138,204 in new sales for Elite:, delivering an incredible 3190% ROI. This meant that when Elite: re-opened, it relaunched with a bang.
Highly Commended:
CJ Affiliate & Acorn TV – Harnessing relationships, trust and expertise to deliver streaming subscribers
Highly Commended:
Saint-Gobain Digital Centre
Finalists
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CJ Affiliate & The North Face – Investing in the brand: Trialling lead generation in retail
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Incubeta & Quintain Living: Driving Performance in a Virtual World
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MCG Digital Media: Dominating property investment lead generation by adopting AI with a mobile first approach.
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MoneyGram / Artefact: Mobilising mobile money transfers
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PHD UK: Audi Fleet Vehicles
Best Paid Search Campaign
Winner:
Increasingly: AI Collections for Scandiborn ‘Buying the project not the product’
In this campaign, AI was combined with innovation and human expertise to deliver impressive uplifts in Google Shopping campaigns for kids clothing and furniture retailer, Scandiborn.
Scandiborn knew that Google Shopping customers would generally only buy the single product they clicked on, and this drained its advertising budget, inflated the overall cost of sale and squeezed already tight profit margins.
Scandiborn decided to present customers with everything they need at the beginning of their parenting journey, with intelligent product bundles based on algorithms that predicted what customers would buy together. AI Collections was created. The totally automated product uses customer and product data, in combination with AI, to inject relevant product bundles straight into Google Shopping results. AI Collections powered an entirely separate Google Shopping campaign for Scandiborn, achieving +12% in Google Shopping revenue that was 18% above the target ROAS.
Highly Commended:
Carat & N Brown Group: Reimagining PPC best practice in the age of machine learning
Highly Commended:
Spark Foundry & Asda: Settling the biggest debate in Search
Finalists
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Carat and Co-op Food: Go Faster? It’s what we do.
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Launch Online & Aria Resorts: Selling Holidays in a Pandemic
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MCG Digital Media: Providing the care home industry a welcome boost in 2020.
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Merkle: Turbocharging Shopping activity on a tiny spark of a budget
Best Use of Data and Insights
At VoucherCodes our mission is simple: to connect our 8.9 million smart shoppers with more than 5,000 restaurant, retail, and leisure brands across the UK.
Via our site, mobile app, and browser extension we’re able to create highly-tailored and innovative campaigns to deliver on a range of business objectives. Our Partnerships team is dedicated to understanding your specific needs and will work with you to create campaigns that support your strategic goals.
So whether you’re looking to attract new customers, communicate a fresh brand image, drive in-store footfall, or increase basket value, we’ll be there side-by-side with your team to provide the best possible solutions.
Winner:
Revenue boosting AI & data-driven product discovery for Denby Pottery by Increasingly
The e-commerce team at UK-based Denby Pottery wanted to drive incremental revenue by increasing average order value through the implementation of AI and data-driven product bundling technology on their website and in marketing channels.
Enter Increasingly, an innovative AI product bundling platform. Increasingly’s AI platform intelligently sells product bundles and collections on-site, in-store, and in Google Shopping and Facebook ads. For Denby, Increasingly implemented a multi channel solution to aid product discovery on both the on-site experience & Denby’s Google Shopping marketing channels. Increasingly launched on-site AI Bundling, and AI Collections for Google Shopping. This achieved incredible results; there was a 50% increase in AOV driven by Increasingly and now bundling is a key part of their e-commerce strategy
Highly Commended:
IBM, Eightbar and Verizon Media- Match point: ‘The Greatest Championship’ Wimbledon
Highly Commended:
Publicis OneSearch: Data Smarts Save Clients Millions
Finalists
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Airtime Rewards identifying and delivering a performance marketing strategy for Greggs.
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Cult Beauty x Cardlytics
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UpSellit and Samsung – Using Machine Learning to provide incremental revenue
Best Data-Led Campaign
Winner:
Medialab & Guide Dogs: Filling a COVID Fundraising Gap
Sponsor a Puppy (SAP) is Guide Dogs’ flagship fundraising product, and with the arrival of the pandemic, many channels of fundraising were forced to stop. Amongst those was face-to-face fundraising, which was one of the core fundraising pillars for Guide Dogs.
In an effort to tackle this, an agile, data-driven, granular approach to planning and buying media during the crisis was created. This allowed SAP to make the most of channel opportunities in the market, whilst ongoing analysis of data and results via Medialab’s proprietary data platform, Apollo.
This enabled the company to operate a test and learn approach, broadening targets, accessing new audiences, and driving reach. The campaign was an undeniable success, significantly beating existing objectives that were put in place at the beginning of the year.
Highly Commended:
Awin & TalkTalk: Walking the Walk to Profit
Finalists
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CJ, Great Little Trading Company & Cardlytics: Data-driven affiliate, driving incremental sales
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IBM, Eightbar and Verizon Media- Match point: ‘The Greatest Championship’ Wimbledon
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Incubeta & The Perfume Shop: Using Seamless Search to Drive Revenue Growth
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Partnerize and Reward for MandM Direct
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Rakuten Advertising & Cardlytics for Harvey Nichols: Driving growth through cardlinking strategies
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Stellantis, Starcom and Nielsen: Driving 15% media efficiency by optimising multi-touch attribution
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The Underpensioned Campaign by NOW: Pensions and The 10 Group
Best Paid Social Campaign
Winner:
PHD UK, Tribal, Facebook, VW Financial Services: VW ID.3 EV Education Campaign
The objectives for this social campaign were to help the audience overcome barriers to purchase by driving awareness of the ID.3 and building consideration through engagement with informative, educational content. To capture maximum unique reach within the UK population, the strategy spanned three social media platforms: Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. It was considered that those open to considering an electric vehicle are a varied audience with broad interests, meaning the strategy aimed to target EV considerers on the platform they most preferred, with content and ads aligned with how they were most receptive to and willing to engage with key information.
The results were very impressive – in total, the paid social campaign delivered awareness and consideration of the ID.3 throughout. The innovative ad format significantly boosted consideration, generating over 3200 quality visits to the Volkswagen UK website with more than a 55% reduction in cost, and generated over 111 million impressions overall.
Highly Commended:
Rakuten Advertising & Astley Clarke: Record breaking Cyber Week Performance
Highly Commended:
Starcom & ASICS: Winning the UK’s Race for Freedom
Finalists
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Aira & Intentionet – Building Connections & Conversions Via LinkedIn Ads
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CHS Agency: Petplan Best Care
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CHS Agency: The British Horse Society Member Acquisition Campaign
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Groupon – Sending Some Love This Valentine’s with Vodafone
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MG OMD: NHS – COVID-19 Test & Trace App – Launching a life-saving app in record time
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ROAST & Tin Man: The Get It Right (from a Genuine Site) Campaign
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Summit & Joules: Maximising peak performance through Paid Social
Best Managed Affiliate Programme - Enterprise
We’re PerformanceIN, we connect and engage with the performance marketing community whilst facilitating industry debate, education and rewarding innovation, success and best practice. With its roots way back to 2001, PerformanceIN is the leading global performance marketing publication, shedding light on the most important matters and trends in the measurable side of marketing.
Winner:
eBay Partner Network
Acceleration Partners (AP) has supported the management of eBay Partner Network (ePN) across Europe and the U.S. since 2018. AP are fully integrated eBay team members; this allows for seamless communication and programme management that drives growth. At the start of 2020, eBay was focused on increasing efficiencies across marketing channels, ensuring a maximum return on investment for every pound spent.
The core objective for ePN was to grow the UK affiliate channel’s efficiency to 18, increasing incremental revenue at a higher rate than spend. The strategy focused on recruitment, launching new eBay campaigns and initiatives via the affiliate channel, engaging with partners and customers, and analysis and optimisation.
The programme strategy allowed ePN to surpass its 2020 targets across the UK, realising substantial incremental growth via the affiliate channel.
Highly Commended:
Optimise Media for GoCompare.com
Highly Commended:
Rakuten Advertising & Timberland: ‘Accelerating’ Growth Through a New Business Model
Finalists
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Awin & BT Group: Working as one, with Scrum
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Awin & Wilko – Riding the Covid Wave: Reshaping strategy in the face of adversity
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CJ Affiliate & Bose – Agile affiliate: Driving growth during lockdown
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Optimus Performance Marketing & Kwik Fit: Driving Tactical Change
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Partnerize and Navigate Digital for Pizza Hut Delivery
Best Managed Affiliate Programme - SME
Winner:
Genie Goals in Partnership with Piglet: Exceeding Expectations in the Affiliate Channel
PIGLET decided to launch its first affiliate programme in 2020. The company’s luxury bedding and sleepwear products were experiencing increased demand, with most people spending more time at home, meaning it seemed like the perfect time to do so. Expansion into other channels was set to be a key driver for growth for PIGLET, and the affiliate channel was forecast to contribute £99k in additional revenue, as well as provide an opportunity to test how different promotional mechanisms could impact the company’s growth. The team underwent a period of testing multiple forms of activity, and it soon became clear that the channel was set to far exceed expectations, delivering +65% to the forecasted revenue and, in doing so, establishing affiliates as a key part of PIGLET’s continued growth strategy.
Highly Commended:
Le Col and Acceleration Partners: Pedalling Success Via The Affiliate Channel
Highly Commended:
Navigate Digital & Craft Gin Club: Expanding Programme Growth of the UK’s Number 1 Gin Subscription Club
Finalists
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Crabtree and Evelyn: Best in class approach to affiliate marketing
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Impact, Scale & eve Sleep: Size matters, how to double your partnerships
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Optimus Performance Marketing & Construction Materials Online: Building Online Success
Best Affiliate Marketing Innovation
Winner:
Gobsmack & Admiral Insurance: Admiral Rewards – Customer Engagement Programme
Admiral identified the need to increase loyalty in its existing customer base. The company commissioned research into the different types of loyalty programmes on the market, identifying the ones that consumers found most relevant and engaging.
From this, Admiral found Gobsmack, who had conceived a customer proposition fulfilling Admiral’s ambition; a fully-branded customer engagement platform that enabled customers to collect cash rewards via retail purchases, helping towards the cost of the renewal or a new policy purchase. The money earned is collected in their ‘digital wallet’ and when the customer has renewed or bought a new policy, the cashout is automatically triggered to the customer’s bank account.
Gobsmack’s marketing programme allows Admiral to engage with its customers more regularly and with more relevance to their needs than would ever have been possible previously, via their shopping habits.
Highly Commended:
Awin: Tesco Innovates In-Store Experience
Finalists
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Awin + Branch unlock the app for boohoo
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ForwardPMX: The Perfect Pairing with Scotch Malt Whisky Society Ambassadors
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OptimiseMedia Market Intelligence
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Partnerize and The Specialist Works for OVO Energy
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Publisher Discovery & LinkConnector Take Affiliate Recruitment with AI to Unprecedented Heights!
Best Use of Content Commerce
Winner:
Starcom & Domino’s: Real-Time Data Insights at the Speed of NHS Emergency Services
When the first UK lockdown hit in March 2020, Domino’s search team needed to innovate a fresh approach to how they reported data and supported their content marketing teams. The ‘Behavioural Search Sensor’ (BSS), was built using data from several different data sources in order to track behavioural changes. Combining governmental policy changes with search trend data, the BSS helped to provide real-time insights that reflected the public’s attitudes towards the pandemic.
Within days of the tool being in operation, search trends were identified, relating to the public’s desire to support NHS staff. This fed into Domino’s commitment to support communities through charitable partnerships and projects, kick-starting the £4 Million NHS Pizza Giveaway campaign. Domino’s’ was able to further support the campaign with a SEO-targeted blog article that served as a key organic traffic and ranking driver. Not only did the BSS tool inform the most successful SEO content marketing campaign in recent years for Domino’s UK, but it also outperformed the originally set performance objectives by 300%.
Highly Commended:
Auto Trader & PR Agency One: Eau de New Car Campaign
Finalists
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Awin & Sky Mobile: Content Collaboration for sky-high sales
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Groupon – Sending Some Love This Valentine’s with Vodafone
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Hargreaves Lansdown & finder.com: Guiding investors through a global pandemic
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MediaVision & Share to Buy – Staying Ahead of the Market
Best Use of Influencer Marketing
Talking Influence is brought to you by the team behind PerformanceIN, who are specialists in curating great content, research, communities, and events. Our mission is to help support the influencer marketing industry by showcasing the very latest case studies, news and stats to support everyone’s growth within the eco-system.
Winner:
PHD UK & TikTok: Driving Excitement for the Launch of the VOLKSWAGEN Tiguan
Challenged by the client to leverage emerging social channels to generate social buzz and position Volkswagen as a forward thinking brand, PHD UK developed an integrated TikTok campaign that would become an industry first for an automotive brand.
Using TikTok’s Creator Marketplace, PHD identified the most relevant creators to work with by analysing its audience data, profiles, content creativity and previous campaign performance. The team then leveraged audience and search data to build a persona of the ideal creator to work with and then developed a shortlist based on audience alignment. Working closely with three established content creators, specially selected to build the Tiguan’s credibility amongst its target market, PHD UK successfully co-produced and repurposed the content into an engaging TopView TikTok ad.
As a result, brand awareness and engagement objectives were smashed and engagement targets were exceeded by 53.7%.
Highly Commended:
Rakuten Advertising & Jo Malone: Using Performance Data To Inform Influencer Strategy
Finalists
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Awin, Carphone Warehouse & Google: Influencing the Smartphone Market Through the Pixel Lens
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Impact & Mapiful
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Partnerize for Charlotte Tilbury Beauty – Magic Makeup Stars
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Zorka.Agency: YouTube Progress Bar for a Mobile Game Promotion
Best Use of Performance During COVID-19
Winner:
LES MILLS On Demand
COVID-19 meant lockdowns across the UK and the world and for LES MILLS, a family-owned provider of world-class group fitness programs, it meant revenue from their core business nosedived almost overnight.
Their solution was a massive consumer play: throwing all of their resources behind LES MILLS On Demand and targeting the millions of fitness fans now stuck at home through performance marketing. Doing more with less, they chased the ambitious targets they’d set to maximise the opportunity and safeguard their future – and delivered a 664% increase in UK subscribers to LES MILLS On Demand. They turned crisis into opportunity, rebuilding as a performance marketing engine that continues to drive incredible results for LES MILLS On Demand and that has ensured the wider business will emerge from the pandemic stronger and better equipped for sustained future growth.
Highly Commended:
Awin & Tastecard: Evolving from Advertiser to Publisher to Drive Revenue in a Global Pandemic
Highly Commended:
Itineris: How the RAF Museum Shop Delivered Record-breaking Sales
Finalists
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Impact & LetsGetChecked: Testing times bring innovative partnerships
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Lovehoney in Partnership with Webgains
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Piggy puts Partners First!
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Rakuten Advertising & Kurt Geiger: Providing NHS workers with £1m in discounts
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Starcom & Domino’s: Real-Time Data Insights at the Speed of NHS Services
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VoucherCodes NHS platform launch
Best Integrated Performance Campaign
Millions of people globally trust Finder to help them make better decisions. We understand that making everyday life decisions such as finding a credit card, buying a home or choosing the right insurance can be daunting! That’s why we’re here. Our goal is to help people navigate those complex decisions by making them less of a chore (and hopefully less of a bore, too!).
In the UK we now help a million people each month learn how to get a better deal across hundreds of categories from financial services to travel and shopping. Our content experts create in-depth guides, reviews and comparison tools to meet the needs of our wide range of users.
Winner:
Auto Trader & PR Agency One: Eau de New Car
Auto Trader appointed PR agency One with the aim of increasing the search engine visibility for new car deals search terms. New car customer acquisition was a key area pinpointed for improvement. With Q4 being Auto Trader’s biggest quarter of the year, it was imperative to implement a creative campaign to cut through competitors’ marketing.
And so, the Eau de New Car campaign was created around the UK’s first perfume that encapsulates the scent of a brand-new car. This contentled marketing campaign was fully integrated, combining PR, SEO, social and content, CRM, house activity and OOH. The pair created a spoof perfume advert as the focal point of the campaign, that led the strategy for channel deployment and created high engagement with both consumers and press.
Highly Commended:
Tug & GenesisCare – Integrated Media Planning To Support Patients’ Cancer Care Journey
Finalists
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CHS & HSBC UK: Agility and innovation within the Mortgages marketplace
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MG OMD & MAC Cosmetics – Virtual Try On
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OMD UK: McDonald’s Appy Days
Best Brand Engagement Campaign
IMS London is a hybrid conference which educates brands, agencies, tech platforms and content creators, enabling them to make smarter decisions on their influencer marketing campaigns. Our events are carefully curated and designed with both influencers and brands in mind giving access to great content, networking opportunities and potential partnerships all in one action-packed day.
Winner:
ASICS & Global Savings Group Working in Aid of Mind to Support the Movement for Mental Wellbeing
In a year that was hard for everyone, ASICS partnered up with mental health charity Mind to promote psychological well being through sport. The company showed commitment to taking action through encouraging people to get physically active, which has been proven to improve mental health.
GSG saw over 200% uplift in GMV YoY across the sports vertical in 2020, and understood that for so many people sports became an escape and a way to stay mentally healthy. This meant a partnership with ASICS was a no-brainer.
The campaign was built around the following messaging: Enjoy a 10% discount. For each purchase made, a donation was made to mental health charity Mind. This strong messaging, twinned with the discount, led to a successful campaign both in terms of performance and engagement; performance was up +154% and engagement +26% for the campaign period.
Highly Commended:
Partnerize and The Specialist Works for OVO Energy
Finalists
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Awin: Samsung Supports Emergency Workers
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OMD UK: McDonald’s “I’m Lovin It Live”
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Taboola, Otty and QueryClick
Global Excellence
Love Savings Group is a PubTech Company operating in the performance marketing space helping advertisers drive sales and consumers save money through a portfolio of over 40 owned international coupon websites.
With over 10,000 advertisers and white label partnerships with The Irish Times in Ireland, Stuff in New Zealand, 7 News, ACM and Now to Love all in Australia Love Savings Group provide a truly global reach for advertisers.
Winner:
RevLifter, CJ & AT&T: Keeping the US Connected
In early 2020, AT&T set RevLifter and CJ the challenge of using deal personalisation to drive new customers for its growing mobile, TV and internet division.
Despite the challenges, namely data collection and SEO obstacles, not to mention the physical distance between AT&T, CJ, and RevLifter, the trio created a totally unique approach to incentivisation. They took a localised and tailored approach, involving a real-time ID of the customer, the type of product they wanted, and if they were new-to-file.
The results speak for themselves; this partnership has delivered consistently excellent results from their innovative campaign, a 34% increase in sales over the six months to March 2021.
Highly Commended:
Impact, Silverbean & HelloFresh: Delivering a More Human Partnership
Finalists
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CJ & Dell: Global Expansion Par Excellence
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Harvey Nichols & Rakuten Advertising: Scaling business across the globe
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Marriott International, Acceleration Partners, and Partnerize
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twentysix, Deckers & Awin: DIVE into 2020
TEAMS, TEAMWORK & AGENCIES AWARDS
Best Team in Performance Marketing
Winner:
TopCashback
The team at TopCashback is passionate about fairness and doing the right thing. They aim to determine what the fairest thing for everyone is in any given situation, meaning they can dictate how they treat their members and colleagues, and it also pertains to how they treat existing and prospective partners.
In 2020, the team actively focused on supporting SMEs as much as bigger clients. Working hard to eliminate barriers and actively recruit, educate and providing more opportunities was of high importance. They reflected and put themselves in the advertiser’s shoes, holding themselves accountable to their mission statement. They worked with partners to help them through the uncertain period, ensuring fairness, despite not knowing how long the financial hit would last and the depth of it.
Highly Commended:
Acceleration Partners Client Services Team
Finalists
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Awin: We are the extra mile
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Best Team in Performance Marketing: DMi Partners
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Rakuten Advertising’s UK Team
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ROAST: Integrated performance team delivers excellence in 2020.
Best Performance Marketing Agency
Partnerize is the leader in partnership automation. The Partnerize platform is the only of its kind to deliver a fully integrated, comprehensive suite of discovery, recruitment, optimization, payment, brand safety and fraud prevention capabilities for marketers seeking a high transparency, scalable subsidy to alleviate pressure on their unit economics as a result of over dependence on primary sales and marketing channels. Supported by unrivaled service including the category’s only in-housing support program, with Partnerize, you’re in control of the entire partnership marketing lifecycle—all on a single platform. Partnerize has a global footprint, retaining offices in Australia, Japan, the Netherlands, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Singapore, and the United Kingdom. For more information on how Partnerize helps turn your partnerships into a profit center, please visit https://partnerize.com/en.
Winner:
Better Partner Marketing – Acceleration Partners
Acceleration Partners is absolutely committed to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), and supporting the wider industry. The team co-founded Turn the Talk, an initiative they worked on with Connected Path to address a lack of diversity at speaking events in the industry. AP also sits on the UK industry DEI steering group.
The agency is passionate about providing an industry-leading service, with a 58% YoY increase in the number of clients it manages, creating improved affiliate programmes for over 30 leading brands.
The company’s global offering for clients has also been accelerated, with a 75% increase YoY in the number of clients managed by global teams. The pure passion for improving the sphere is demonstrated by the valuable blogs, articles, speaker presentations, eBooks and podcasts that are created with the intent to teach and drive the industry towards a positive future.
Highly Commended:
ThoughtMix: Supporting Our Clients Through the Pandemic
Finalists
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Aira Adopts Machine Learning to Revolutionise Client & Agency Performance
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ForwardPMX: The Path to Becoming a Global Data & Technology Driven Marketing Services Partner
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Medialab: Turning Transparency into Transformative Growth
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Optimus Performance Marketing: The Foundations of Success
Publisher of the Year
CJ Affiliate (formerly Commission Junction) is the leading global performance marketing platform, specializing in affiliate programs that drive scalable, profitable growth for businesses around the world. CJ is the platform of choice for over 3,800 global advertiser brands across all verticals including retail, travel, finance & technology, and network & home services. CJ facilitates partnerships with over 80,000 publishers that allow brands to engage billions of consumers worldwide. As part of Publicis Groupe, aligned with Publicis Media, CJ leverages unparalleled data, technology, and expertise to power a truly customer-centric approach to performance marketing. Dare to think big and expect even bigger results with CJ.
Winner:
TopCashback
Following the pandemic, TopCashback made the decision to support clients by shifting focus from tenancy to ensuring better cashback rates. This often meant waiving tenancy fees altogether. They felt it was more important to create market-leading cashback rates so members saved more money and clients could garner more sales.
The company’s Mega Deals (24hr time limited offers) were also heavily invested in. These not only drove volume, but also brand awareness and new customer sales.
In 2020, the company launched on average 130 new SMEs per month (37% increase YoY). Brand awareness and visibility is critical for SMEs, but usually costly. Due to this, the company developed new ‘brand spotlight’ placements on their blog, category page and themed hubs on a performance-based model. In Amarante’s first six months of launching, sales increased by 1100% and transaction value by 1028%. Clicks went from 14 in the first month to over 1,500 after six months of
exposure.
Finalists
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Genie Ventures
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Global Savings Group adding value through user-guided innovation and client mindset
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JoinPiggy: Browser Extensions, done differently.
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VoucherCodes
Industry Rising Star
JoinPiggy is an International money saving destination that allows its users to acquire incentives when shopping online, in the form of cashback and/or Discount codes. We offer our users our services via a browser extension, localised websites, email and social marketing.
Winner:
Mel Blue – Director of Affiliate Marketing – Optimus Performance Marketing
Mel is the Director of Affiliate Marketing at Optimus-pm. She started out as an Account Executive, learning the ropes straight from the team’s CEO. Now, after just four years, Mel is successfully managing and overseeing the team at Director level.
A true rising star – over the last year, Mel has shown a true passion for the affiliate industry. The amazing thing is that it is not just a passion for the current state of the industry, but for its future potential and progression. Mel is an individual who looks at the big picture in an innovative, unique and highly credible way. Judges commented that when discussing the future of the industry, Mel takes you on a journey with her, and is not simply regurgitating facts but showing a complete understanding of everything she discusses. Well done Mel!
Finalists
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Jake Hodgkiss – TopCashback
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James Norris – The Groupon Reach Network
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Jessica Tomkins – Skimlinks
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Lizzy Mackay – CJ Affiliate
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Lois Evans – Admiral
Partnership of the Year
Winner:
Silverbean, HelloFresh x Totum: Breaking the Mould
HelloFresh’s aim was to reach university students during a key period: freshers week and back to university dates. To do so, the brand needed to take a fresh, new approach beyond anything that had been done previously.
By working closely with TOTUM, Silverbean helped HelloFresh reach its core audience and, critically, retain those customers with campaigns tailored empathetically to the student experience during a global pandemic. The partnership involved creating movie parodies showing the simplicity and ease of cooking HelloFresh meal kits via influencers, TOTUM and HelloFresh itself.
The partnership delivered an incredible month-on-month uplift and 437% year-on-year new customer subscription uplift for HelloFresh, as well as an 852% increase in customer lifetime value (LTV) through an extended discount offer. TOTUM also saw its performance on HelloFresh’s partner programme increase through huge audience uptake, and a reach of 300k achieved across its social platforms during the promotional period – truly a win for all involved.
Highly Commended:
Giftcloud, Vodafone and USwitch: Maximising Affiliate Campaign Success with Digital Reward Incentives
Finalists
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Global Savings Group driving incremental sales for AO.com
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Redbrain & Clockwork Affiliate
TECHNOLOGY AWARDS
Best Performance Marketing Technology
At Aklamio, we believe that a company’s best assets are its customers, their networks, and the power of incentive marketing. Our mission is to empower brands to succeed in a customer-centric world by building the world’s #1 platform for customer incentivization.
Founded in 2011, Aklamio has become Europe’s most successful referral marketing solution, trusted by companies such as Virgin Media, Three, Vodafone, PayPal, Endesa, o2, and over 300 international brands.
Our 100+ employees work in our HQ in Berlin and London, with teams in Madrid and Paris. Aklamio was ranked 2nd fastest growing technology startup in Germany (Financial Times, Europe’s 1000 Fastest Growing Companies, 2019) and continues to expand internationally.
Winner:
Impact Partnership Cloud
Impact’s Partnership Cloud technology allows for growth, maximising the impact of partnerships and unlocking the power of automation for a huge variety of programmes. Its technology provides the efficiency that affiliate and performance marketers expect and applies it to the expansive and sophisticated world of today’s partnerships. The SaaS platform has aided in partnership programmes becoming the fastestgrowing revenue stream for a wide range of organisations.
Impact showed true innovation after noticing a potential gap in its offering; its technology helps them grow revenue through the partnership channel. It allows seamless work across a range of partnership types, including influencers, strategic B2B partners, premium publishers, and others. As well as this, it allows advertisers and partners the freedom to negotiate mutually beneficial terms, such as higher rates for large order values.
Highly Commended:
RevLifter: The Deals Hyper-Personalisation Platform
Finalists
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Bidnamic automated bidding platform for Google Shopping
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Envolve Tech
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Summit: Forecaster triumphs in head to head
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The Partnerize Platform
Affiliate Network or SaaS of the Year
The Groupon Reach Network is the collaboration of vouchercloud and Groupon along with our whitelabel partners. Supported by The Mirror, Mumsnet, and the Irish Independent, the Groupon Reach Network is the ultimate shopper destination
As one of the industry’s largest players, the Reach Network gives you access to more customers, unrivalled reach, streamlined account management, and improved campaign performance – all through a single, unified approach.
Winner:
Awin: Protecting Publisher Businesses Through Innovation
Due to the pandemic, there was an immediate need for clarity on programme changes. Awin created a localised, detailed file of all commission changes, payment delays and programmes suspensions, hosting it in the interface.
The launch of a performance tracker in Awin’s COVID content hub enabled publishers to benchmark their performance against regularly updated sector, market and device data. The content team published 40+ whitepapers, webinars, podcasts, editorials and guides to the COVID Hub, attracting 35,000+ page views.
Awin saw 15,000+ new publishers join the network in the UK, an increase of 61% on the previous year – incredible results considering the situation. £1m in commissions was generated through Bounceless Tracking, a new affiliate tracking solution. There was also £5m in commissions which were tracked through In-App tracking that would otherwise had been missed.
Finalists
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CJ Affiliate: Publisher Choice of Network
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Rakuten Advertising
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Skimlinks
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Webgains UK
INDUSTRY & VERTICAL AWARDS
Best Fashion Health and Beauty Campaign
Global Savings Group is a tech-driven rewards company empowering millions of people to make better purchase decisions.
Founded in 2012 and headquartered in Munich, Global Savings Group is Europe’s largest shopping rewards company with an existing international footprint in more than twenty markets. We provide people with access to exclusive savings, deals, product information & reviews and discovery from their favourite stores and brands.
Through its successful acquisitions of IGraal, Pouch, and Shoop, GSG consolidates the industry and manages to establish a comprehensive portfolio of leading consumer brands and solutions.
In addition, we have built outstanding partnerships with the largest news publishers worldwide, such as Daily Mail, Metro, CNN, El Pais, Le Monde, Focus among many others. We are committed to connecting brands and customers worldwide, building strong partnerships, and helping shoppers make smarter decisions.
Winner:
Awin, LOOKFANTASTIC & UNiDAYS: Making Freshers Fantastic
With a change in market conditions occurring in March 2020, due to the pandemic, LOOKFANTASTIC and UNiDAYS took a more targeted approach and focused on the annual student freshers period to maximise revenue growth for LOOKFANTASTIC amongst the crucial student demographic.
The approach centred on capitalising on UNiDAYS’ most crucial member acquisition period of the year. LOOKFANTASTIC used the period to create an affinity with those members in the lead up to them becoming new customers. The long-term influence of this campaign allowed LOOKFANTASTIC to retarget these users again during Cyber Week 2020, providing student customers with a recurring home for their beauty product needs.
The campaign was an obvious success – LOOKFANTASTIC received over 9,000 new customer orders – 40% of total UNiDAYS orders, and gained over £300,000 in new customer revenue.
Finalists
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Fountain & HRA Pharma – ellaOne
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Impact, Starcom, & Penhaligon’s: Selling the scent
Best Customer Conversion Platform
Winner:
15gifts
In 2020, 15gifts rolled out a new engine for its online guided selling platform, partnering with Vodafone. Unexpectedly, as the pandemic hit, the platform was called on to mitigate the impact of Vodafone store closures. It enabled less digitally-confident customers who couldn’t get personal advice from high-street stores, to receive a highly-personalised guided selling experience – enabling them to feel confident about buying their products online.
15gifts also introduced a range of new platform capabilities in 2020, including its Profiles offering, which delivers significant additional value from the customer data generated in the recommendation process. It allows clients to know as much about prospects as they do their existing customers.
More than 15 million Profiles were generated across 15gifts clients, giving the company unprecedented prospect information. Vodafone alone captured a completely unique set of insight data on 1.1 million prospects, and delivered an ROI of over 40x, with the engine still continuing to learn and improve
Highly Commended:
RevLifter: The Deals Hyper-Personalisation Platform
Finalists
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Envolve Tech
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Uniqodo: Promotion to the Power of Experience to delight customers and amplify results
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UpSellit UK: Working with Advertisers at all stages of the funnel to help them reach their full potential
Best Retail and eCommerce Campaign
Winner:
Incubeta: (Pub) crawling Amazon for Laithwaite’s Success
After identifying areas of huge opportunity, Incubeta launched an in-house Amazon Market Monitor insights tool and drove astounding online growth for Laithwaite’s Wines.
The entry is impressive, as Incubeta were able to offer a product nobody else could, due to it being produced in-house and completely bespoke. The product took a huge amount of creativity and work from those involved.
Incubeta took Laithwaite’s Wine’s Amazon Merchant Page and drove astounding levels of revenue; there was a 323% increase in revenue, all due to the company hacking the system with its exclusive, innovative technology
Highly Commended:
Carat and Co-op Food: Go Faster? It’s What We Do.
Highly Commended:
VoucherCodes, AWIN and Very: Driving Performance During the Most Challenging Q4 on Record
Finalists
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AI Bundling Supercharging AOV for Craghoppers by Increasingly & AWIN
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Awin, VoucherCodes & Currys PC World: ‘Reaping Rewards in an Unpredictable Climate’
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Carat & N Brown Group: Reimagining PPC best practice in the age of machine learning
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Itineris: How the RAF Museum Shop delivered record-breaking sales
Best Finance Campaign
Winner:
Giftcloud, Santander & MSM: A Revolutionary Way to Incentivise New Customers by Offering a Helping Hand.
The MoneySuperMarket Group (MSMG) briefed Giftcloud with the aim of creating an appealing acquisition incentive with a difference. The collaboration resulted in an industry first – the solution being a digital gift card which ‘auto-redeems’, meaning less time and effort for the consumer.
Santander showed a desire to offer a Balance Transfer Credit Card promotion by rewarding customers with a £20 Amazon gift card (the only of its kind offering an incentive and 0% interest on purchases for three months) ensuring that the offer would be the strongest available to customers. This was promoted across the MSMG websites. The campaign produced brilliant results, with Santander seeing a traffic increase of 161% and a sales uplift of 103%. It also proved to be highly profitable too, adding an 80% uplift in net profit over five years compared to a non-incentive led campaign. The Giftcloud team offered customers the best possible service, ensuring they were correctly rewarded and that the Money Saving Expert brand suffered no negative impacts.
Highly Commended:
CHS: One-click Wonder: Using the Amazon Shopping Experience to Increase Spend on HSBC UK Debit Cards.
Finalists
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CHS: Nudging HSBC UK to the top of digital wallets
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Hargreaves Lansdown & finder.com: Guiding investors through a global pandemic
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Infectious Media & Weber Shandwick – Creative agency: HSBC fights back against online fraud
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Optimise Media for GoCompare.com
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The Kite Factory: How sustainable bank Triodos used Twixtmas to drive new accounts for the new year
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Zenith & Natwest: Why pay when you don’t have to?
Best Technology and Telecoms Campaign
Winner:
Uniqodo for BT – Next-Gen Consoles for BT Customers around Black Friday
Uniqodo helped BT overcome its challenges of how to sell next-gen consoles to only its existing customers, at a point in time where 100% of its focus was on e-commerce, with all non-essential retail closed during lockdown two.
It needed to control the sale of next-gen consoles to only BT customers, manage the anticipated increase in traffic to BT Shop so as not to interrupt BAU retailing, and help BT deliver a great first launch into the world of gaming.
This was a job for Uniqodo and a brilliant example of its PromotionX approach; combining advanced promotions with great customer experience onsite to deliver bigger and better outcomes for promotions. A great showcase of how codes can be used to achieve business objectives without the need to discount; something that they are helping to educate the market by busting the myths of promotions.
Highly Commended:
Optimus Performance Marketing & Sage: The Teamwork Cloud
Finalists
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Awin: The future is exciting with Vodafone and Samsung
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Groupon – Sending Some Love This Valentine’s with Vodafone
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Merkle: Unlocking New Audiences With The Power Of Clubcard Plus
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Thanks to Aklamio, Virgin Media achieved a 60% uplift in sales in two weeks in 2020.
Best Travel Leisure and Lifestyle Campaign
At VoucherCodes our mission is simple: to connect our 8.9 million smart shoppers with more than 5,000 restaurant, retail, and leisure brands across the UK.
Via our site, mobile app, and browser extension we’re able to create highly-tailored and innovative campaigns to deliver on a range of business objectives. Our Partnerships team is dedicated to understanding your specific needs and will work with you to create campaigns that support your strategic goals.
So whether you’re looking to attract new customers, communicate a fresh brand image, drive in-store footfall, or increase basket value, we’ll be there side-by-side with your team to provide the best possible solutions.
Winner:
Impact & TUI: Turning Turbulence Into Turbocharged
This entry is the story of how travel giant TUI took exceptional steps to adjust risk, improve flexibility and ultimately position their partner programme to create growth coming out of 2020.
TUI and Impact worked together to improve diversification, moving away from traditional voucher and cashback sites and instead finding new target audiences, as well as changing payment models to add improved efficiency.
Through quick adaptation, the TUI team was able to generate 850% growth in key partners for specific objectives. They also put the programme in the best possible position to grow coming out of lockdown by improving efficiency by 19% and increasing the content share of the programme by 44%.
Highly Commended:
Student Beans, Domino’s & CJ: Domino’s Freshers Campaign 2020
Finalists
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Aira & Hagerty – Reaching The ‘Ones Who Got Away’ With Discovery Ads
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OMD UK & Caravan & Motorhome Club – 2020: Thriving in a COVID Crisis
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The Kite Factory: How Birch successfully launched a category-breaking hotel during a pandemic
Best Agency-Led Account
Impact is the global leader in Partnership Automation and catalyst for the new Partnership Economy. Impact accelerates enterprise growth by automating the full partnership lifecycle, including: discovery, recruitment, contracting, engagement, fraud protection, optimisation and payment processing for enterprise partnerships. Impact’s Partnership Cloud™manages over £50B in e-commerce sales and processes over £2B per year in payments to partners. Impact drives revenue growth for global enterprise brands such as TUI, Ticketmaster, SecretEscapes, Treatwell, KwikFit, Virgin Experience Days and HelloFresh. Founded in Santa Barbara, CA in 2008, Impact has grown to over 500 employees and twelve offices worldwide. To learn more visit www.impact.com.
Winner:
Pizza Hut Delivery & Navigate Digital: Now That’s Delivering Growth
In 2020, Navigate Digital and Pizza Hut planned and executed a performance strategy across multiple online channels – search, affiliate, social, display and video – adapting to the challenges of the pandemic and optimising the media mix to maximise the performance marketing’s channel’s ROAS.
Underpinning success has been the strength of the relationship between the agency and advertiser, with Navigate working closely with the Pizza Hut marketing team to understand business objectives and requirements, whilst being agile enough to align with the real-life wider context and move investment between online channels where needed. The result was a performance marketing campaign which delivered an attributed ROAS 14% above target, and increased revenue by 29% YoY. Whilst data was used to inform the agency approach, the results delivered were only possible due to the close partnership. Building a thriving relationship was the foundation to exceeding business targets.
Finalists
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DMi Partners: Smart Marketing Strategy that had Sock It to Me Dancing Its Socks Off
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Tailor-Made Media has positioned Bright Green Plastics as the industry voice of plastic recycling
Best Emerging Technology or Startup
Winner:
Envolve Tech
Envolve Tech, the virtual shopping assistant, enjoyed an incredible first full year as an affiliate-based technology, with growth across its key areas – clients, sales generated and commissions – of several thousand percent, quickly establishing it as one of the key technology players in the affiliate space.
The platform combines a number of key areas which ensure that human touch remains – even in this automated, ML-driven world. Envolve built a data-analytics team – who ensure that they’re not just answering questions correctly, but focusing on key events, from Valentine’s Day to Mother’s Day, Christmas through to relevant sports events, giving the user that human level experience that can often be missing in the chat-bot arena. They also developed more relevant icons to ensure they grab attention – but also that it is never an interruptive experience. Through 2020, handover rate was reduced from 30% to 5% meaning that an amazing 95% of queries asked of the Virtual Shopping Assistant were successfully answered.
Highly Commended:
gocertify: Verify Shoppers for Group Discounts
Best Industry Initiative
Branch provides the leading cross-platform linking and attribution platform, offering solutions that unify user experience and measurement across devices and channels. Branch powers mobile links and cross-platform measurement to more than 3 billion monthly users across the globe, and has been selected by over 75,000 apps since 2014 — including Adobe, BuzzFeed, Yelp, and many more.
Winner:
Awin Access
The Awin Access initiative was created to serve the needs of micro-SMEs, opening up the affiliate channel with a solution that offers inclusion for all.
Following a year-long research and pilot phase which uncovered the barriers to entry for micro-SMEs looking to use digital marketing services, Awin Access was launched. With a quick and easy set-up, Awin Access breaks the mould of classic affiliate marketing. The initiative positions affiliate network technology to empower SMEs to flexibly manage all their online relationships with one tracking and payments solution.
With a no-risk, free trial period and no long term contractual obligations, Awin Access democratised partnerships and affiliate marketing in 2020 for an audience that had been resistant to the channel. The initiative helped 550 businesses launch successfully in 2020, and the success as a whole means it is now available and actively helping businesses in Benelux, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the Nordics, Eastern Europe, Ireland and is in pilot in the USA and Brazil.
Finalists
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CJ’s Tracking Integrity Initiative
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Global Savings Group spearheading affiliate In-App integration
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Planit’s Founders Package – Removing barriers to entry for early stage businesses
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VoucherCodes NHS platform launch
Best Wellbeing Initiative
Winner:
Awin: 4 days 4 success: a Journey To Increased Employee Happiness and Productivity
When the pandemic hit last March, all employees at Awin switched to remote working. To safeguard employee wellbeing throughout this challenging time, Awin wanted to explore how it could support employees by enabling them to enjoy a better work/life balance.
They initially trialled a 4.5-day work week, and when this proved seamless, and with no decrease in performance or client service, Awin’s Executive team were encouraged to pursue an even greater change, piloting a 4-day work week (4DW), enabling employees to benefit further from increased flexibility, while Awin, and its partners, have benefitted from better productivity.
Initial indicators show that employees are not rating their workload higher YoY or feeling less accomplished because of working 4 days. The accomplishment increases with almost 9% in February YoY comparison, signalling a positive message so far.
Highly Commended:
Partnerize: A Holistic Approach To Wellbeing
Finalists
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ForwardPMX People Team Brings Winter Wellness Initiative During Europe’s Third Lockdown Cycle
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Webgains UK