Agencies Featured
| Campbell Ewald Epsilon Geometry Global Midnight Oil Olson 1to1 |
PAN Communications Publicis Hawkeye RAPP STIRISTA Wunderman |
Campbell Ewald
Principal/CEO: Kevin Wertz. CEO
Founded: 1911
Services Offered: Insights & Strategic Planning, Creative, Digital Design & Development, DM/CRM, Media Planning & Buying, Retail & Experiential Marketing, Data Cognition, Content and Social Media
Sample Clients: MilkPEP, Kaiser Permanente, OnStar, Valero, Covered California, IHOP, Travelocity, CARFAX, Empire State Development, Cadillac, Snuggle, Country Inns & Suites
Describe your agency in 10 words or less: Nonstop innovation and invention. Even on a Monday.
The below quotes are attributed to Lora Stock, Group Director Social and Content Strategy
We’re really proud of the work we do on Cadillac Magazine. This print, tablet and mobile lifestyle publication takes its readers to unexpected destinations and celebrates those who Dare Greatly through design, travel, fashion and food. It easily competes with newsstand travel and style magazines, reinforcing Cadillac as a luxury lifestyle brand.
Similar to direct flights, a direct message travels without any random stops or bothersome delays. Direct is all about offering content that intercepts a person when he/she needs it most or when it has the most potential to be disruptive.
Three trends for 2017
Mind the Gif
There’s an ongoing joke in advertising that the client is always going to ask to make the logo bigger. The opposite is true when it comes to social where we are always looking for ways to make the content smaller. GIFs are a great solution – they say volumes at a glance. And they are an easy tactic to dress up direct marketing (like emails or WhatsApp messages) in a way that represents your brand, taps into a cultural trend or is just plain fun.
Rise of the Machines
Access to a wealth of information anytime, has conditioned consumers to learn more about brands on their own time. In fact, more and more people are taking customer care into their own hands – quite literally, by using their mobile devices to connect and interact with bots. As Facebook, WeChat, Kik and WhatsApp continue to fight for innovation dollars from companies that hope to cut traditional customer service costs, we can expect to see improvements in both the interface and AI. But to really change the game, brands need to take what they learn from ChatBots, automate it with their backend data and apply it to CRM/DM programs both on and offline.
Little Data
Big Data is a hot topic and essential to uncovering consumer insights, but little data is critical to building 1:1 connections with people in their digital hangouts of choice. It’s less about lead gen and more about building trust and growing relationships. If you think about it, the consumer journey is just a series of questions. And when brands are able to curate helpful content that answers those questions in a customized, personal way, they win.”
Epsilon
Principal/CEO: Bryan Kennedy, Epsilon/Conversant, CEO
Founded: 1969
Services Offered: Content strategy, strategic planning, loyalty management, real-time content development, direct marketing, brand development, email development/deployment, digital messaging, broadcast/video development, advanced analytics, social, visual design, copywriting, mobile, events/experiential, personal development, customer journey mapping, marketing communications strategy, shopper marketing, digital solutions development, user experience, web development, digital integration, digital experience, data solutions
Sample Clients: Del Monte Foods, Nature’s Way, Juicy Juice, Sanpellegrino, Gemological Institute of America, Cracker Barrel, Lamps Plus, Shire, Amica, CNO, Red Roof Inns, Road Scholar, Dell, BP, Dunkin’ Donuts, Hormel
Describe your agency in 10 words or less: Epsilon provides unrivaled customer insights, world-class technology and data-driven creative.
The below quotes are attributed to Bryan Kennedy, CEO, Epsilon/Conversant
Sample Case Study
In 2016, Epsilon developed and launched an integrated advertising campaign to promote the launch of Cracker Barrel’s seasonal Campfire Meals.
The program included production of an online video series, “The Worst Camper in the World,” and a multi-touch email campaign designed to deliver high engagement with video links, downloadable apps, social content, e-commerce links and directions to the nearest Cracker Barrel restaurant. Additionally, Epsilon’s digital media arm, Conversant, created animated banner advertisements for a 4-week digital media campaign using proprietary custom audiences and location intelligence data to drive traffic to restaurants.
A social campaign was deployed as well, targeting custom Facebook audiences, as well as Cracker Barrel’s Facebook and Instagram followers. The integrated campaign resonated with the target audience, bringing 13,000 new unique website users, 2X higher than average casual dining video ad CTR and a strong click-to-open rate for all deployed emails.
Geometry Global
CEO/Principal: Carl Hartman, CEO North America
Founded: 2013
Describe your agency in 10 words or less: Data and customer centric activation agency
Three trends for 2017
The ability to identify, understand and apply data driven insights to design and deliver customer centric programs that stimulate ( business ) growth, strength brand loyalty and increase customer satisfaction.
- Infusion of buying (purchasing transactions) data will enhance targeting accuracy and improve messaging relevance
- Marketers must avoid alienating the customer by guarding against the over use of data when personalizing communications
- While mobile first solutions will continue to gain in prominence, traditional channels (e.g. direct mail) will continue to thrive due to availability of data to improve targeting and message relevance”
Midnight Oil
CEO/Principal: Tom Stillwell
Describe your agency in 10 words or less: Midnight Oil is a dynamic marketing agency
Services offered: Strategy, Creative, Print, Digital, OOH, Promotions
Sample clients: Netflix, Warner Bros. Pictures, Universal Home Entertainment, SoftBank, Robotics Connection
Olson 1to1
Date Founded: 2007
Principal/CEO: Guy Cierzan, Managing Director
Services Offered: Strategy & Analytics, Loyalty & CRM Strategy. Digital Strategy, Insights & Analytics. Digital Platforms & Experiences, Loyalty & CRM Platforms, Customer Data Management, Digital Experience Development, Platform Operations. Creative & Program Management, Creative Strategy & Execution, User Experience & Architecture Design, Program & Content Management
Sample Clients: Wyndham Hotels Worldwide, Amtrak, Hyatt Hotels, Luxottica, Citi, Darden Restaurants, Amtrak Guest Rewards Relaunch
Describe your agency in 10 words or less: End-to-end loyalty and CRM, delivering personalized experiences and measurable growth.
The below quotes are attributed to Suzy Cox, EVP Client Success & Growth
Case Studies
Amtrak Guest Rewards
In 2016, Amtrak, with the help of Olson 1to1, relaunched the Amtrak Guest Rewards program, offering a simpler, easier and richer experience: It was now faster for members to hit their first award ticket, and there was more availability to use their points when they want to, with a simplified earning and redemption structure. We also provided more service options, like changing or canceling redemption travel on Amtrak.com, with no point expiration. All this while increasing communications and relevance across the member journey.
Our joint goal was to activate more members and increase redemption, and in just nine months, not only were total redemptions up, but overall member engagement as well as program enrollments were up in strong double digits.
Luxottica LensCrafters Clarifye Immersive Experience:
In late 2016, Luxottica’s LensCrafters partnered with Olson 1to1 to come up with a creative, conceptual solution of an immersive, 360-degree video experience called “See How Your Child Sees.” The experience harnessed the power of 360-degree video to allow parents to virtually see through their child’s eyes to experience the daily visual challenges some children are confronted with but may be unable to articulate. The immersive video also gave Mom (parents) a chance to experience a side-by-side simulation of their child’s current vision uncorrected and corrected vision.
The “See How Your Child Sees” campaign was first launched through their CRM channels, specifically targeting moms and households with children, featuring the 360-degree video directly in the communications themselves, allowing parents to open up the email and jump into the immersive experience immediately, regardless of device. These communications also pointed to a unique and branded landing page featuring the Clarifye technology (and video), developed to allow parents to discover and explore more about vision challenges and the impact they can have on a child’s life. We then extended the conversation by activating the “See How Your Child Sees” video on the LensCrafters YouTube and Facebook Pages.
The campaign not only delivered both excellent core actions in the form of eye exams scheduled the week of deployment (representing more than 1/3 of total exams scheduled in the campaign week), but also experienced significant sales contribution throughout the duration of the campaign, including exceeding incremental sales goals and significantly higher than expected ROI for LensCrafters.”
3 Trends for 2017
An ongoing trend we see in our space is that customers and loyalty members are increasingly responding to experiences that brands can deliver, and moving away from traditional rewards, shifting from transactional, points-based programs to experiential benefits that foster brand loyalty.
Brands are increasingly finding opportunities to add value in the customer journey, in real-time and relevant ways by removing friction and enhancing the customer experience throughout those “in between” moments. For example, your rental car company or hotel that reacts to your flight delay by moving back pick up or check in time, upgrading your room or car, etc., to anticipate or alleviate an unforeseen inconvenience.
Finally, another emerging trend we see happening is how physical locations are becoming the link between digital and personal experiences with a brand, in ways that drive loyalty and repeat purchases, particularly in retail. The ability to identify customers as they walk into the store, or even before they arrive, allowing the in-store experience to be truly personalized is allowing frontline associates to deliver an entirely different level of service, from preferences and sizes/measurements to past purchases and available rewards.”
PAN Communications
CEO/Principal: Philip A Nardone, Jr.
Founded: 1995
Services Offered: Integrated marketing, public relations, social media, content marketing, creative services, insight & analytics.
Sample Clients: SAP, MediaMath, BlueCoat, Maestro Health, Fuze
Describe your agency in 10 words or less: Integrated marketing and PR firm with tech and healthcare expertise.
The below quotes are attributed to Mark Nardone, Executive Vice President
PAN’s Content Fitness Test and Report. Collected data from 100 CMOs, professional marketers and industry leaders. Analyzed the findings and highlighted key trends, takeaways and pain points within PAN’s annual report. As a result, PAN received 119 submissions to view the report with a 14.29% conversion rate. By the end of 2016, it had contributed to 65 new leads for PAN.
What does direct mean to you?
In marketing, direct refers to targeting the consumer without the interference of third parties, tailoring your message and content to immediately fit the needs of your intended audience.
3 Trends for 2017
- The increase in artificial intelligence/machine learning in consumer communication
- The switch from mobile as a trend to an integral part of marketing
- The continued use of data to personalize content and customer experiences
Publicis Hawkeye
CEO/Principal: Steve Dapper, CEO
Founded: 1999
Services offered: Strategic Planning, CRM, Direct response analytics & modeling, Direct response test design & implementation, List planning & buying, Data list processing, Direct mail and email creative, Direct mail production, Retention & nurture campaigns
Sample clients: Allstate, T-Mobile, PNC Bank, Terminix
Describe your agency in 10 words or less: 300+ person fully-integrated marketing agency with roots in direct marketing.
The below quotes are attributed to Steve Dapper
What does direct mean to you?
Direct response marketing is the choreographed delivery of marketing messages direct to the customer using addressable media. Addressable media includes web, digital display, mobile, addressable TV, email and direct mail.
3 Trends for 2017
- Increasing personalization
- Increasing use digital behavioral data to drive personalization and contextual relevance
- Increasing choreography of digital and mobile media
We are specialists at creating sales-driving, integrated direct response campaigns that drive customer acquisition, lead generation, retention, cross-sell/up-sell and loyalty for a wide spectrum of clients
RAPP Worldwide
CEO/Principal: Marco Scognamiglio
Date founded: 1965
Services offered: CMR: Digital, Mobile, Social
Sample clients: AARP, American Family Insurance, Bank of America, Best Western, Charter Communications, ExxonMobil, Gilead, Johnson & Johnson, L’Oreal, Mercedes-Benz, Pepsi, SAP, Toyota, and Virgin Media
Describe your agency in 10 words or less: Global, data-driven creative agency, building meaningful relationships between brands/people.
The below quotes are attributed to Jessie Kernan EVP, Applied Data & Strategy
Sample Case Studies
PayPal France: The new PayPal P2P service makes life easier: now, sending money is simple, instantaneous and free. The challenge was to demonstrate how consumers could free themselves from old money habits: so ancient that people forgot how unpractical they are. A digital and DOOH campaign with a single headline was designed: “”New Money only needs your phone. Not your IBAN.””
Flying Blue – Mister Miles (Chatbot) Through its activations, Flying Blue aims at generating conversations and creating entertaining and innovative digital experiences. This year Mr Miles launched a contest to find his successor. A dedicated chatbot was built and structured around 15,000 conversational schemes and 10 challenges using extra API for text, object, voice recognition, live video recording and data collection. Mr Miles exchanged over 15 million messages with 105,000 participants of 48 nationalities.
RAPP owned UX strategy and UI to perform ongoing optimizations of the flyingblue.com platform (for members and non members). We deployedy the idea of Flying Blue as a service brand through the interactive experience and worked on the switchover from the age of compensation to the age of utility, to create an intimate empowering tool – making Flying Blue a program members will use.
What does direct marketing mean to you?
Direct marketing connotes different things for different groups of people or audiences. For those deep in the industry, “Direct” is, fundamentally, the focus on individual consumers — using data effectively to know who they are and what they want. For most others, “Direct” means direct mail and maybe email and direct TV response. At RAPP, we’re considering both of these ‘definitions,’ but we’ve moved away from direct as a channel, as more as a means of describing customer centricity and relationship-building, through data-driven marketing.
3 Trends for 2017
- Data ethics and privacy take center stage
- Narrow application AI takes root
- Content matures as a discipline
Stirista
CEO/Principal: Ajay Gupta
Describe your agency in 10 words or less: Data-driven digital agency for B2B/B2C segmentation, email, social and display advertising
Founded: 2009
Services offered: Data: B2B & B2C Data Enhancement and Segmentation, Social Media Enhancement, Cultural Data, Political Data, Life Event Trigger Data
- Email: Creative Strategy and Deployment, Email Data Quality and Appending
- Social: Social data, Creative Strategy and Deployment, Optimization and Reporting
- Display: Audience Segmentation and Targeting, Social and Mobile Optimization
Sample clients: Weight Watchers International, Great Clips, Harland Clarke, Texas A&M University
The below quotes are attributed to Ajay Gupta
What does direct mean to you?
Direct” translates to data – and data-driven – marketing to produce accountable results where brands engage with stakeholders – no matter the ad tech, medium, platform, or objective
3 Trends for 2017
- Social data leveraging is a game-changer for sales and marketing organizations. That is, if social media user-posted information, with its immediate signals for relevance, can be acted on quickly, even in real time. Stirista helps B2C and B2B marketers, and both their sales and marketing teams, by offering tested tools to append multichannel prospect and customer contact information to business leads and CRM databases.
- When data is the fuel for strategy and marketing execution, “trust” in data – its timeliness, its accuracy, its ease in accessibility and application – is the currency that allows sales and marketing activity to result. Too often, data quality – and the ability to stage and use accurate data in a timely way – undermines trust… both inside enterprises, where data silos are too often rampant, particularly between sales and marketing teams, and outside the enterprise, between brand and consumer. Thus, confidence level in data quality matters must take precedent in any data-driven marketing enterprise… it’s up to the brand to decide if 90-, 95-, or 97-percent accuracy (or greater) helps make analytics and data-driven marketing – and the creative that flows from it — the best it can be.
- The whole purpose of onboarding customer data is to bring unstructured data to the addressable media universe. Using ad tech and responsible data sources enables brands to link the self-reported and observed digital, social and mobile contexts and behaviors – and use these data for analysis segmentation, attribution and marketing strategy decision making. With more than 90 percent of transactions still happening offline, marketers still need to use email, phone and mail data – in addition to social and mobile channels – to help guide consumer interest to action. Yet brands can be incredibly effective now that they are able to identify buying triggers, sentiment and other contextual triggers from unstructured data sources – and overlay this intelligence with more traditional CRM.
Where change in marketing is everywhere – some truths do not change:
- Marketers still need accurate contact data in all channels – a means to link contact data across platforms
- Marketers still need to have compelling content
- Marketers still need to have a discipline to test, record, analyze and refine
Wunderman
CEO/Principal: Mark Read, Global CEO
Founded: 1958
Services offered: Data Analytics & Insights: Owned Data Services, Business and Data Strategy, Target Audience Assessment and Scoring, Omni-channel Management, Investment Optimization; Creative Communications & Experiences: Integrated Marketing: Mobile, Content & Social, CRM/Loyalty, Digital Experience/ Live Events; Technology Enabled Marketing: Platform Enablement, Consumer Database Build & Run, Data Onboarding and Activation, Marketing Automation Deployment
Sample clients: Ford, Microsoft, Dell, Pfizer, United Airlines, Glaxo Smithkline, Shell, Best Buy, Deutsche Telekom, United Health Care Group, Nestle, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Mutual of Omaha
Describe your agency in 10 words or less: We inspire people to take action.
The below quotes are attributed to Mark Read, Global CEO, Wunderman
Case Studies
Fundacio?n Hue?sped is an Argentinian NGO with regional reach. It is devoted to the area of Public Health, focusing in HIV/AIDS. All of the services provided by the NGO are free of charge and are financed through donations and support.
Every time someone tests for HIV/AIDS faces the possibility of obtaining a positive result. At first this generates stress and fear and then a feeling of relief and happiness when they see it’s “negative”. However, regardless the outcome, the process creates a unique and responsiveness approach towards the issue. We then thought that it would be very helpful to take advantage of the happiness that a negative result generates and place those people in the shoes of someone affected by AIDS.
We therefore placed a sound chip in all the negative tests that were performed during last November (like the ones used in Christmas cards) When people opened the envelope and learned that they had tested negative, the voice of a person suffering from HIV surprised them with his/her story and encouraged them to transform that good news (not being affected by HIV) into something that could really help those who had the illness People could donate on the spot through a QR code printed in the result which they had just obtained.
Offline (Print Media) Media also communicated the action on AID’s worldwide day. In summary we obtained 4.5MM media impressions and 2MM earned media while monthly donations increased by 67%. But, what is most important, we regained the country’s concern related to the fight against HIV and their interest on the activities of Fundacio?n Hue?sped.
Dream Team is one of the UK’s favourite fantasy football games. But other games were about to launch. We not only had to convince previous Dream Teamers to stay with us, we also had to acquire new players. Fantasy managers usually pick famous names from big teams and watch the points roll in. But last season was different. Outsiders Leicester City lifted the League trophy, turning all assumptions upside down. And if this season is anything like last – fortune would favour the brave. We devised the cheeky line “It pays to experiment” and, using well-known club nicknames, we showed innuendo-laden scenarios of fans “experimenting” with unfamiliar players. Central to the campaign was a personalized video sent to 200,000 Dream Teamers, using data – their team and league names, results, etc – culled from last year. In just 4 weeks we reached 60% over the original target. Total social reach was over 12 million people. And although the game is free to play, 170,000 of our target audience went on to pay to join the premium game.”
What does direct mean to you?
Today, all marketing is direct marketing. Brands want to get the right message, to the right consumer at the right time. Wunderman has transformed its business into a digital agency but retained its direct marketing heritage, both creativity and data, to enable it to inspire people to take action.
3 Trends for 2017
- Emphasis on building a joined-up consumer experience and bringing the digital and traditional touch points together.
- A focus on customers or consumers and putting them at the heart of marketing.
- The practical application of AI to actual marketing campaigns in a way that delivers incremental ROI.
With the increasing focus from clients on data, ROI, cost and effectiveness, there’s never been a better time to apply the principles of direct marketing to marketing. Lester Wunderman invented much of the discipline and today we are reaping the benefits of his foresight in the work we do for clients. Increasingly, we are working with clients on much broader and bigger problems, helping them to transform their entire marketing approach to a much more flexible, digital one. The future has never looked brighter.
