The IDM Business Performance Awards: Diamond and Facet Winners 2005
The IDM Business Performance Awards scheme underwent a major redesign for 2005 to align itself more closely with the institute's new positioning. Whilst the top prize of The Diamond award continues to recognise and reward the total business achievement of strategic direct and interactive marketing programmes there are now additional awards, collectively known as 'The Facets'. These each recognise marketing effectiveness in a particular discipline of direct, data and digital marketing.
 The IDM would like to thank all the sponsors of the 2005 awards and in particular the principle sponsor Blue Sheep for it's support. |
| 2005 Diamond Award Winner/Runners Up | 2005 Direct Categories Winners |
DIAMOND WINNER 
Client: Gala Group
Agency: Perspectiv Marketing and ISD Computer Services
Programme: Gala Impact
Gala Bingo clubs compete on the high street as leisure and entertainment venues. Over the past five years, the group has developed a set of centralised strategic tools that allow local clubs to target their direct mail. The system has become an expression of the company’s management philosophy and has been fundamental to allowing front-line managers to take ownership of their business performance.
The judges picked Gala Impact as the overall winner for demonstrating “a powerful use of technology from the database right through to digital print”. They noted that the success of the business over the past five years has been driven to a significant degree by localised, targeted and effective DM. Gala Group operates 166 Bingo clubs and 30 Casinos across the UK, each of which operates as a standalone business unit with significant autonomy. National brand and member recruitment campaigns are developed centrally, with individual club managers running promotions to generate footfall. These are executed in response to local conditions, such as competitor activity, low attendance or to support national promotions.
The group recognised a need for more rapid and targeted communications to allow club managers to optimise their marketing expenditure. Legal requirements for bingo players to take out membership and swipe their membership cards each time they play meant a central database already existed. The Impact programme introduced a club-level DM system that allowed tailored target data selection, creative templates, budget management, campaign tracking tools, and campaign production and despatch within 24 hours. Although average campaign size per club is only 300 items, Impact is now responsible for peak DM volumes of 70,000 items a day, with 20,000 campaigns being generated each year.
Via a user-friendly software package, members can undertake list selection, applying detailed criteria such as age, gender, and time and frequency of visit. A trial programme in one bingo club has added transaction data, providing a 73-cell segmentation by game played, frequency of visit, and margin. A control group is randomly selected to allow for comparison of results.
Templates for letters, postcards and incentive vouchers are provided, each of which is individually costed. Once the mailing file and message have been determined, the campaign is downloaded by secure electronic link to a specialist digital print operation. The success of the Impact programme has led to a similar process being introduced to the Casino business, and testing is taking place of mobile phone SMS marketing.
SILVER WINNER 
Client: COI
Photo Agency: Draft London/PHD Confidential
Programme: “Pick it up. It’s yours”
The Pension Credit provides a guaranteed minimum income for anyone over 60 years of age. Pensioners must apply voluntarily – they do not automatically receive the extra payments. To stimulate uptake, the Department for Work and Pensions ran a year-long data-driven, multi-media campaign that maximised eligible applications and minimised non-eligible response.
The judges recognised “a real breakthrough in government communications”, which generated astonishing response volumes – 2.4 million pensioners receiving the Pension Credit in year one. The campaign demonstrated a sophisticated segmentation technique that had a 98 per cent correlation between targets and eligible pensioners. From the outset, it was recognised that demand could either be too low, due to perceived barriers to making a claim, or too high, leading to the call centre being swamped. Applying a bespoke segmentation was essential to keep non-eligible responders below an acceptable target of 30 per cent.
The creative approach – “Pick it up. It’s yours” – was designed to overcome pensioners’ perceptions of being low priority and unjustly treated. Direct mail was used as the primary contact and response medium, supported by television, press, door- drops (to uplift under- performing postcode sectors), internet and face-to-face. Awareness of the advertising reached 84 per cent and awareness of the benefit hit 76 per cent. Year two activity has targeted an additional 2.7 million recipients.
BRONZE WINNER 
Client: BT
Agency: OglivyOne
Programme: Business Plan
Following the deregulation of business telephony in 2001, BT faced the loss of market share (with the potential for even greater subsequent loss of consumer revenues). By applying an unusual customer insight, gained from research, the company was able to reduce attrition rates and make Business Plan its fastest growing business package.
The judges applauded “a good defensive strategy from the incumbent and dominant player in the market while under attack”. They noted the use of a retention programme to increase customer loyalty and provide more value.
When researching why business customers might defect to low-cost rivals, BT made the counter-intuitive finding that fear of out-of-control costs was greater than the attraction of low prices. This insight formed the basis of the new product proposition – Business Plan – which offers capped call costs. Direct marketing was used to retain existing higher- value business customers that had not signed up for a new call package in the previous six months and were vulnerable to defection. Algorithms were applied to revenue and calling pattern data to indicate potential savings from the plan in direct mail shots.
The campaign target of 100,000 registrations for Business Plan was hit six months ahead of schedule, retaining over £150m of revenues .
| DATA TARGETING WINNER | Sponsored by |
| The option to borrow additional funds at the same rate as a mortgage is attractive to consumers at specific life stages, such as getting married, changing job or having children. By adding this dimension to traditional geo-demographic targeting, a significant uplift in response was achieved, together with a lower cost per contact. This “disruptive” profiling brought together a proven financial segmentation system with life-stage data from commercial sources. This was further refined by overlaying a financial motivation segmentation to divide customers by attitude. Direct mail copy was then tailored to the target market’s motivation with diff e rent executions for each group. | |
| DATA INFORMATION INTEGRATION WINNER | Sponsored by |
| Gala has a database of every member together with the frequency of visits, as the law requires players to become members and register each time they visit. To achieve segmentation by games played and the profitability of each game type, a trial value was selected to capture transactional data in addition to visit information. From this a 73-cell segmentation grew, which re f l e c t e d games played, frequency of visit and margin per game. Mailings were then sent with incentives to players who did not play high-margin games. Incentive vouchers were bar-coded to allow tracking. The result was an uplift in play patterns with increased margin for the club. | |
| DATA INNOVATION WINNER
| Sponsored by |
| Predictive modelling is routinely used to optimise selections for individual campaigns, but the result is often that the best customers are over- contacted, while others are neglected. Britannia used data analysis to identify the contact density threshold at which responsiveness from the best segment declines. Propensity model scores were combined with value data on sales, channel preference, customer responsiveness and segmentation. Business rules were applied to reflect budget, volume and resource constraints. The result was to identify when second- and third-tier customers become more profitable contacts. The company increased revenues by 20 per cent, with a 30 per cent reduction in spend. | |
| DIRECT RETENTION WINNER | Sponsored by |
| Retention is a significant problem in the mobile market. By focusing on customer retention and adopting a new tone of voice in its business-to-business communications, O2 was able to reduce SME account churn to 18 per cent within 12 months. A rolling programme of direct mail and outbound calling was applied to business customers in the 11th month of their contract. A clear, easy-to-read message was used to reinforce the benefits of staying with the mobile network, achieving a response rate of 27 per cent. The programme continues to reduce churn and is being refined and optimised. | |
| DIRECT CREATIVE WINNER | Sponsored by |
| The Sumatran tiger is facing extinction, with just 500 left in the wild. To protect the species from being hunted for illegal trade in body parts and medicines, the WWF needed to raise cash from recent donors and members of its “adopt an animal” schemes. With clutter a major factor in fundraising, a strong creative approach was used – a pack was sent out that appeared to contain tiger bone intended for use in traditional medicine. The execution was kept authentic, including badly re g i s t e red colours and printer errors. This provocative and engaging pack gained a response rate of just over seven per cent and also gained significant campaign extension through public relations. | |
| DIGITAL BRANDING WINNER | Sponsored by WWAV Rapp Collins |
| The iMac generation of young graphic professionals are highly influential within their own industry and beyond. But they are also very cynical towards marketing. Their perception of the HP brand was as a grey utility with relatively uninteresting printers that added little value to the creative process. The “Hype Gallery” campaign changed that. Online and physical space was made available, unbranded, for artists to display their work and print it in large format. The only entry requirement was that works should contain the letters H and P. This generated 3,700 exhibits with 90,000 online visitors and 9,000 visiting the physical galleries. As a result of the campaign, perceptions of HP have become more supportive and empathetic. | |
| DIGITAL CREATIVE WINNER | Sponsored by |
| Many 11- to 15-year-old internet users are aware of the rules for staying safe online – but some still ignore them and believe they will never be “groomed” by a paedophile. To overcome this complacent attitude and expose the risks of chat-rooms and instant messaging, a campaign based on the idea of false identity was created. Using avatars – iconic representations of chat-room users – who speak in the language of the target audience, positive messages were delivered. Rich content and large - format ads were used to gain maximum impact, together with a link to an interactive game – Mission Imposter. Achieving high levels of interaction and typical click-through rates of 22 per cent, the campaign successfully engaged with this elusive group. | |
| DIGITAL ACQUISITION WINNER | Sponsored by |
| Increased recruitment targets coincided with a tougher recruiting environment, as young people were put off by the war in Iraq, showed lower levels of fitness and an unwillingness to serve in the Armed Forces.To meet targets, higher response generation with greater conversion was necessary. An interactive digital ad based on navigating a military map was used to pre-qualify targets and answer initial queries and issues about joining the TA. This attracted target volumes, with 4,032 requests for a more detailed DVD – 54 per cent of all requests during the period. These digital responders were also 12 times more likely to have selected a TA job role they were interested in compared to responders via other channels. | |
