Media Week Awards 2019: Shortlists

JOHN LEWIS & PARTNERS – ELTON JOHN LEWIS

Shortlisted for:
Agency: Media Idea – Launch
Media Innovation
Media Creativity
Best Use of Audio

Christmas is the most important time of the year for John Lewis & Partners, with its advertising recognised as signaling the start of the season.

When audiences discovered, ahead of time, that this year’s ad was called “the boy and the piano”, featuring Elton John, it was important – despite the leak – to still build anticipation.

So, with an ingenious audio rather than visual tease, MG OMD swapped some of the nation’s most iconic TV theme tunes for piano versions, keeping the public guessing as to what was going on and generating valuable earned PR along the way, with the result being John Lewis & Partner’s biggest ever sales week.

STARBUCKS – PSL GIFS

Shortlisted for:
Media Innovation

Pumpkin Spiced Latte (PSL) is our fan favourite and the jewel in our creative crown, but in 2018 we had our work cut out…

Our first challenge was a dramatically reduced budget. We’d spent the past few years building PSL into a social, cultural and aspirational icon – so at least we had solid starting point.

Except that we didn’t…

We’d noticed a movement calling-out unrealistic insta-perfection promoted by influencers, in turn promoting raw, undone realism. Once aspirational behaviour was now seen as a bit “basic”.

This meant our tried and tested “status symbol” approach wasn’t going to work.

The solution was simple: Create some witty stickers and gifs with Instagram and share them with our “Pumpkin Head” audience.

Except we couldn’t…

We could create the gifs but we couldn’t promote them. So, we analysed thousands of Stories to see how our brand appeared and what images, phrases and styles were used positively around PSL. We hand-drew 12 images and tagged and optimised these like a web page.

We delivered global reach of 18.5m surpassing sales of PSL to the point of sell-through by week three of our six-week campaign, all whilst maintaining positive sentiment and brand love of 85%.

AGE UK – NO ONE SHOULD HAVE NO ONE

Shortlisted for:
Long-Term Media Strategy

Across the UK, over 500,000 older people regularly go more than a week without seeing or speaking to anyone and over 1.2m are regarded as chronically lonely.

Since 2015, we have committed to helping Age UK on their mission to tackle this hidden tragedy, but the scale of the task was a daunting one.

There are 185,000 charities in the UK, and Age UK has just 3% SOV. Also, no one wants to think about old age, especially in the context of charities (children, cats and cancer are typically the ‘big three’ in the UK).

We had to act boldly and bravely to make the nation care about loneliness and act.

Our overarching ambition was to engage the nation with the issue of loneliness, by heightening awareness, action and understanding. However, people’s thoughts and feelings were not going to change overnight, we knew this was a long-term ambition, which was going to take a significant amount of time to embed.

This has been a journey of evolution, optimisation and bravery as we built on each year’s success to tackle loneliness and drive positive outcomes for Age UK.

VIRGIN TRAINS – SOMETIMES ADVERTISING ISN’T THE ANSWER

In Summer 2018, the Virgin Trains brand had hit a low.

It needed to do something bold. Through cultural and social insight, we identified that the solution sat with influencing the product experience rather than in advertising alone.

The result was a category-changing decision to remove weekend peak fares, celebrated by a campaign that encouraged spontaneity, via multiple partnerships activated by triggers in weather and local event data.

The result was an average of £33k additional revenue every Friday as well as the removal of overcrowding and a better customer experience.

Not only did the work champion the Virgin spirit. It showed the success of looking beyond traditional advertising to deliver results.

SPECSAVERS – DON’T LOSE THE PICTURE

Shortlisted for:
Agency: Media Idea – £250K-£1M

This ambitious, multi-channel campaign for Specsavers highlighted the importance of taking your eye health seriously by showing what media would be without sight.

Maximised through creative media, ‘Don’t Lose the Picture’ created impact at scale by aligning with the highest rated visual media placements and then removing all visuals.

Delivered across TV, VOD, OOH, cinema, digital and social media, the power lay in the integration of the creative execution with the media placement, such as a cinema partnership with Sony Pictures’ Slaughterhouse Rulez, which saw the trailer run in cinemas with no images, just text describing what the viewer should be seeing.

The activity drove a yoy 164% increase in online eye test bookings, the highest peak of 2018.