2019 Winner Archive

Inflecto Media and Mindshare delivered an immensely successful mobile install campaign for BPme as it made its market debut. By deploying media partners and traffic sources to scale and target relevant users and implementing a more detailed targeting approach from previous data, Inflecto Media far exceeded expectations, achieving a staggering 127% install to overall purchase rate, outperforming all other paid digital channels in terms of user engagement and ROI.

With Samsung looking to combat the ever-growing e-commerce pressure of Amazon, Increasingly partnered with the global tech firm to grow both their website and basket revenue, utilising the platform’s AI product bundling and intelligent cross-sell and up-sells. Increasingly ran six promotional campaigns over four months, driving 46% more sales through its AI-driven promotional campaigns whilst helping customers find the best offers, bringing more convenience in their user journey. Judges simply loved the entry.

In partnership with Webgains, NMPi designed and built a series of rich media banners to promote Liverpool FC’s 2018/19 New Balance Kit, utilising narrative sequences, fan engagement and customers experience whilst delivering a smart programmatic media buying strategy that selected placements to drive maximum performance. On kit launch day, the banner ads drove a 45% uplift in website traffic and revenue driven by NMPi’s display ad campaigns increased by 53% year-on-year. A value-adding campaign that fully understood the relationship between Liverpool FC and their fans.

Teaming up with one of the biggest-selling automotive manufacturers, The Lead Agency was responsible for generating 8,000 qualified test drive leads to help Ford increase new vehicle sales across its entire fleet. With an ambitious year-end target, The Lead Agency leveraged its popular automotive digital brand, Car Keys, to create unique pieces of content, achieving more than 750,000 impressions and achieving a significant conversion rate for new Ford vehicles. The campaign demonstrated clear lead generation in the performance marketing channel.

With BT facing stiff competition in the mobile market, Essence was tasked with finding a scalable solution within paid search for targeting both existing and new BT mobile customers. Using BT’s customer ISP addresses, Essence took audience targeting to the next level as they reached BT household users by search only, delivering more sales with greater lifetime value and lower cost per acquisitions (CPAs). Forming bespoke landing pages, the innovative approach delivered exceptional results over a short period of time, contributing to 23% sales for mobile and lowering CPAs by 44%.

With Office Outlet launching its affiliate programme and online revenue growth a challenge, RevLifter’s technology proved the ideal solution to overcome the odds as they launched Office Outlet’s personalised deal page, where a button under the discount code box encouraged users to access personalised deals and drive incremental actions. The campaign catapulted RevLifter to the number one spot on Office Outlet’s affiliate programme, generating sales and revenue via the deal page and button deployed alongside the customer’s basket, which converted at a rate of 54%.

The Telegraph Travel increased lead generation significantly through the strategic use of social media content and performance marketing tactics, surpassing budgets whilst establishing a strong trajectory for growth. Using an affiliate model with their tour operator partners, the year-long campaign focused on distributing new and evergreen travel content through Facebook, Instagram and YouTube to increase customer engagement and acquire highly qualified prospects. The campaign achieved standout results, constructing an award-winning content marketing approach that inspired travel readers.

Amid pressure from the wider economy, the closure of high street retailers, and the dominance of Amazon, both CJ Affiliate and Debenhams made a solid statement in not only surpassing the challenges and achieving the retailer’s targets in Q4, but also establishing a healthy affiliate programme that beat the high street odds. By the end of Q4, they achieved 7% year-on-year revenue growth and reduced the cost of sales by 13% through innovation, automation and safer spend, allowing affiliate to become the most paid media channel for a huge UK brand.

Following award wins, investor funding and big retailer adoption, in just 18 months, RevLifter has taken the affiliate marketing industry by storm thanks to the platform’s innovative meta tag solution RevPage, which utilises AI algorithms to understand real-time signals from each user’s on-site behaviour and live basket before delivering an incentive. RevLifter has become an award-winning solution, attracted multi-million-dollar investment and launched with some of the world’s biggest retailers, making it a serious contender on the global e-commerce scene.

Looking to produce strong and brand-aligning content that attracted the attention of digital publications, iProspect assisted Mira Showers in triggering a series of improvements across SEO as well as driving traffic to the brand’s new website. The collaboration with external experts from Bristol University and team departments to learn bacteria build up generated a truly innovative and unique content campaign that picked up national press, leading to a 28% uplift in page-one keywords for Mirashowers.co.uk and a 22% increase in organic traffic year-on-year.

With Vodafone launching the UK first’s dedicated youth mobile offering, VOXI, the telco provider teamed up with Awin to find a community of influencers and brand advocates that could reach an entirely untapped audience. Using brand awareness and customer acquisition targets simultaneously, the campaign reached a wider audience of under 30s across the UK with over 8 million impressions, 9,000+ total engagements and £40+ CPA, proving that sufficient revenue can be driven from outside the more traditional telco comparison site space.

This campaign demonstrated a clever combination of programmatic technology and use of data at all stages of the user experience. Using smart creative to feed Liverpool FC fans’ growing desire to purchase their 2018 kit and customise it according to player popularity resulted in excellent returns. A major factor in this was fan experience and getting this right to ultimately benefit performance, which was achieved through the use of data and automation but, most importantly, the human understanding the relationship between the club and its fans.

Following significant subscription growth in 2017, NBC Universal’s direct-to-consumer on-demand subscription video service hayu set a higher subscription volume to be delivered with lower CPA. Planit was called upon to help move media buying beyond CPA to drive high volumes of signups whilst keeping strict control of ROI. The company beat its growth target through its smart data marketing strategy that focused on lifetime value – something the judges described as “difficult” to achieve in the industry.

In what judges described as a “very emotive campaign”, The Kite Factory came up with an inspiring solution to support the amazing work WaterAid do to help communities access clean water. The agency formed the #Untapped campaign, immersing their audience in the day-to-day life of the village of Tombohuaun, one of the communities WaterAid helps. They used immersive digital media to remove the distance between donor and recipient, the campaign generated a staggering fundraising total of £8.4 million and delivering an overall ROI of 5.2.

With 40% of the Cult Beauty’s turnover now generated overseas, Rakuten Marketing were tasked with helping the brand’s ambitious growth target of 50% for the affiliate channel, focusing on internationalisation, which was organically led by the location of its customers. The global programme surpassed all expectations and targets, delivering 113% growth year-on-year, and tapped into key target markets like China and Russia, showcasing both the success of the affiliate channel and use of influencer marketing, demonstrating a fine example for other marketers looking to expand globally.

With a client services team made up of 125 staff across four divisions, Awin continues to go above and beyond to match clients’ needs on all sides. The global affiliate network champions the industry by understanding partner needs whilst dedicating time and resources to help them grow, carried out through intelligent insights, innovative ideas and overall strong campaign results that speak for themselves.

iProspect continues to bring forward research and insights that drive and shape the performance marketing industry. A prime example was the launch of the Performance UX index, a holistic measurement framework to continuously improve user’s experience while increasing the convergence of SEO and conversion rate optimisation to ensure businesses are fully prepared to address the two disciplines. In addition to hitting client objectives and delivering ROI campaigns for Captain Morgan and The Economist, iProspect demonstrated forward-thinking initiative in an incredibly competitive market, making them a standout winner.

Though working in a quick-paced industry often comes with its challenges, the team at TopCashback diffuse the hardship with their consistent efficiency, ceaseless affability, innovative offerings and their clear drive to deliver the best for their advertisers and the consumers who choose to use them every day, making them worthy winners of the Industry’s Choice of Publisher award once again.

Clementyne Lavender stood out as an exceptional talent, recognised by her peers for her tenacity and fresh perspective of the affiliate marketing industry. In her new role as media partnerships manager, Clementyne demonstrated that her intuition for a business opportunity was spot on, having grown the commission earned by Media House publishers as well as inspiring the next generation of affiliate marketers. Clementyne is a shining example of an industry rising star, showing passion and drive for not only Awin but the industry as a whole.

Innovative, adaptive and powerful; RevLifter’s leading tool RevPage, has been the star of the show in the e-commerce scene during the last 18 months, utilising AI technology and a unique algorithm to deliver on specific goals, which influences both the type of incentives on offer and the customers they’re handed to. Retailers across multiple categories have been quick to embrace the innovative solution, immediately seeing increased average order value and conversion rates against their current voucher partners, turning heads in the global e-commerce industry.

During an eventful 2018, which saw a number of challenges such as the General Data Protection Regulation, Safari’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention and Google Chrome’s parallel tracking update arise, Awin pursued its plans to inform and ensure the best solutions available were in place for the market changes whilst continuing to drive the industry forward. The network’s proactive approach to providing informative thought leadership, expertise and insight while promoting the channel to new audiences makes the company a cut above the rest in affiliate marketing.

Having established their brand and winning formula in 20 markets, Global Savings Group took things to the next level to break into and monetise the UK’s whitelabel space by introducing structure, strategy and cohesion to not only disrupt the voucher code space but also become a top performing publisher. Their creative approach to campaigns coupled with their personalisation capabilities was refreshing and added a new layer of top funnel value to the voucher publisher category, leading to a successful period for the publisher.

After 2017’s stand out campaign with Very, which delivered impressive revenue figures and three award wins, both Very and vouchercloud knew that Awin needed to continue to innovate and use all the data at their fingertips to achieve further success in 2018. Awin devised a strategic annual plan that was jam-packed with individual campaigns to meet Very’s objectives. The results blew competitors out of the water with increased market share, conversions and revenue doubling year-on-year, far exceeding the network’s target.

Having already delivered over 600% growth in five years’ working with Instant Offices, MediaVision teamed up with them once more to drive an additional 30% in equity growth. Despite market challenges, MediaVision stuck to their strengths in driving high-quality traffic to steer the conversion rate thanks to its smart execution of strategic offsite SEO and innovative, technical approach to analysing data. The campaign delivered impressive results, with SEO sessions up by 50% year-on-year and a 49% increase in revenue uptake, maintaining MediaVision and Instant Offices’ solid relationship.

Both iProspect and Marcus crafted a multi-channel approach that would innovatively reach the mass-affluent UK target audience, familiarise them with the brand, and drive them to open a higher-earning Marcus savings account. In just three months, the campaign resulted in a 15% increase in generic searches for savings accounts, and media outlets credited Marcus for lifting UK banks out of a “savings slumber”, ultimately putting consumer’s interest back into savings.

In a bid to deliver sales through personalisation, Smarter Click, Carphone Warehouse and Awin collaborated to produce a campaign that focused on providing a more personalised user journey. By developing Smarter-Layers, which judges described as “abandonment tech on steroids”, Smarter Click was able to read Carphone Warehouse’s data layer and target users on-site with personalised messaging, allowing Carphone Warehouse to deliver increased sales for products and double the conversion rate during a busy Q4 period.

With more pressure to deliver growth and sustain marketing activity for Etihad in 2018, Digitas utilised Partnerize’s platform to track and consolidate costs from affiliate, meta and display activity in console with unparalleled data, robustness and accuracy on behalf of Etihad, enabling them to test innovative strategies and optimise ROI across various channels. Sheer intelligence, alignment and communication skills lead to a 10.2% increase in revenue from metasearch partners year-on-year.