Our Senior Media Account Director, Jodie Hanrahan, was invited to speak at The Drum Live (25 September 2024) alongside fellow Creative Futures team members Cathy Bittner from Canon Europe and Rob Flannery from Nutshell Creative.
They spoke about the campaign they collaboratively managed with sustainable cleaning product start up, Bower Collective, where they joined forces across the print industry and used data and insight to join up digital activity and physical channels like mail, aka ‘phygital’.
They also talked through how offline channels are highly measurable now via measurement platforms like JICMAIL and data match backs, making it a preferable and essential part of any media mix. They had a great turn out and thoroughly enjoyed the session!
While Jodie was at the event, she took the opportunity to attend other sessions throughout the day and shares her key takeaways here…
Spotify telephone booth
In this interactive session, I entered a booth and picked up the phone to be greeted by DJ AI who told me some interesting facts about Christmas audience behaviours and general statistics. I was told that six in 10 people buy their Christmas presents on Black Friday – this was quite a surprise to me because I hadn’t anticipated it being quite so many! Key outtake: If you’re a retailer, ensure you’re taking part in, and marketing around, Black Friday.
What’s next for CX?
Generative AI was a big topic of interest here, with some key stats that stood out being that organisations using AI solutions are 3.5x more likely to, compared to other organisations with no formal strategy, agree they have a culture fit to work on cross-functional AI initiatives, and 76% of senior executives are still working on, or have not yet started, aligning their generative AI strategy to broader business goals. This demonstrates how the marketplace is developing fast and businesses are struggling to keep up, showing the importance of getting data and technology ‘future ready’ (something we help brands to do here at Salocin Group).
Attention, advertisers! Have we got news for you?
Heineken, The Telegraph, 7Stars and Outbrain took to the stage for a quiz with red buzzers, which was quite amusing! It was definitely one of the more entertaining talks of the day, with questions like: “How did a deep-fake AI photo prompt a pop star to get involved in the US election?”. This, of course, referred to Taylor Swift and the AI-generated images of her endorsing Trump. The singer said this had really conjured up her fears around AI and I think you’ll agree it’s some pretty scary stuff! Regulations around the use of AI in this way are still to be determined, so we’ll have to wait and see how this progresses…
Dawn of hyper-personalisation – Intent HQ
A customer AI data company spoke about hyper-personalisation and making optimisations towards the right person at the right time via the right channel – something we talk about all the time in marketing but is now becoming more of a reality that can be achieved with AI.
One of the intriguing things they talked about was using phone data (without personal data) and understanding an individual phone’s routines and activities without breaching any compliance rules. We’re all guilty of carrying our phones wherever we go… there’s such a high level of traceability on phones now, from what you purchase first thing in the morning, to the social media platforms you visit in the evening.
Despite not knowing names and addresses of consumers, having their individual phone activities tracked and marketing tailored to personal phone activity will still provide a hyper-personalised experience, which we should all be striving for.
Making brand everyone’s job – Monzo
Interestingly, when Monzo talked about one their biggest growth drivers they said it was ‘word of mouth’, which led me to immediately think of one of our behavioural science partners, Herdify, who specialise in using AI technology to find word of mouth communities speaking about brands already.
We use this data to enhance typical predictive models by overlaying the Herdify scores to reach these communities and improve response; something Monzo should be taking advantage of! Monzo has a stand-out quirky approach to marketing, drawing the attention of younger audiences.
One my favourites they showed during the talk was their partnership with Channel 4 and the ‘split the bill’ feature in conjunction with one of their dating shows; the perfect partnership! Monzo also highlighted how it’s a myth that younger people aren’t watching TV as they’ve had really strong results from the channel reaching this audience, particularly via live TV…
Savouring success – Beavertown Brewery and Domino’s
According to the Morning Advertiser, 36% of people have at some point stolen a glass from a pub… Beavertown’s Head of Marketing was quick to talk about how he actually thinks it’s great that people steal their wonderfully patterned glasses! Apparently, they’re the most stolen glasses in the country, but Beavertown sees this as ‘free marketing’ given that people then might share on social media about it, or when they have visitors over give them this glass, or even every time they have a glass of water out of it, it’s reinforcing their brand with a natural approach to marketing.
Domino’s spoke about other innovative strategies grabbing attention, such as the Domino’s Heatsuit, which ended up landing 157 pieces of media coverage and 1.55m organic impressions across social – an impressive result from another alternative way to market.
Building a lifetime of loyalty – British Red Cross
During this talk, British Red Cross highlighted how trust is the most important thing required for charities to be successful and how going above and beyond typical personalisation, such as name and address, is crucial for cut through. A statistic that stood out was that, in the EU, people are 23% more likely to invest more if there’s enhanced personalisation in marketing, showing the importance of this for higher value gifts for charities.
British Red Cross also highlighted the importance of having a clear purpose which is well communicated to your audience, so they understand your mission. For them, this was clear after consumer analysis suggested consumers were unclear of British Red Cross’ goal, which was why they had a change in strategy to focus on the emergency response concept and the importance of emotional human connection.
Award winning story – Paddy Power
In this talk, there was a focus on the collaboration between Paddy Power and the charity Prostate Cancer UK – The Big 180. They talked around how they knew their audience was predominantly male and, therefore, how they could help the charity reach men with their key message and save lives. In true Paddy Power style, the ad was quite ‘out there’ and urged men to complete an online risk assessment and get checked if they were at high risk. Not only did they raise £1 million but they also saved many lives through the thousands of people that completed the assessment – impressive stuff!
That’s a wrap! If you’re interested in chatting about any of this further, drop me an email at [email protected].
