It was good to catch up with Catherine Becker, CEO of adconnection recently.
I asked Catherine to give theMarketingblog readers an up to date picture of how her agency @adconnectionUK was progressing.
Everything from the re-positioning of adconnection to the ability to target by location and behaviour all the way through to payments on devices was covered in this Q&A session. Enjoy..
More articles, stories etc about adconnection.
1. Tell me about your repositioning as the Performance Agency.
The re-positioning of adconnection to be the leading performance agency has gone very well.
Our clients and prospective clients have really welcomed the focus to become not only totally measurable in terms of return on investment and cost per acquisition but to ensure we deliver the best cut through for our campaigns. We have re-defined performance in media to mean the emotional connection you get with the campaign, the interaction with the audience and the memorability and distinctiveness we can achieve, just like a great performance at a gig, a sports match or race or a show.
2. You said your relationship with the media has developed even further. Please elaborate.
We also talked all the media owners through the performance re-positionning in the summer at an event on the Thames. They have very much bought into the importance of performance in our campaigns and really want to work closely with us to deliver this. This builds on our already great relationship with them including our annual innovation day when we invite media owners to come in to pitch their latest and best ideas for only 5 minutes each.
It gets very competitive and the winner gets lots of social media and PR coverage. We tend to get 2-3 media firsts as a result each year. We have also started doing this for individual clients as part of our performance planning.
3. You have six new clients. Who are they?
We have been appointed to University of Southampton and London Metropolitan University this year. This builds on our education experience, a strong sector for us. We also started the first campaigns for Positec Worx powertools, including an upcoming TV ad which breaks in November, following a successful digital campaign building up to this. We were appointed by LeasePlan – the largest player in the car lease market. We have started working with Flubit, a great way of sourcing the best pricing online with huge jumps in sales following our advertising in trains and digital/social.
Finally, we have worked with UK Broadband to launch Relish, the new broadband supplier in London.
4. You have had early success with your new client LeasePlan. Give us the good news.
We had a key insight that leasing was not something people were used to in the UK market – most people buy their own cars. We wanted to use media to further accentuate the message that you can have a more expensive car if you lease it. Our message was very practical and rational, and we wanted to contrast that with the emotional ads of the car brands.
So we created a “symbiotic” strategy that paired our rational ad next to the emotional ones of the car brands. We coupled this with upweighted digital and social messaging during the TV ads. We’ve had record sales and enquiries and the client is delighted so far.
5. New people on board. What is the role of Ronnie Raichura? And Tom Bailey?
Ronny has been a great new addition and is running our digital performance team. He has a great background of coming from running iProspect in India where they test many beta partnerships. He has brought these over to us in the UK and we are running many activities not yet widely available. He also has worked at the big tech companies like Marin and Kenshoo so knows the analytics side of digital too.
He has already considerably grown the team and we are offering search, affiliates, display (including programmatic), online video and social. This builds into our harmonised buying across screens (so TV and digital, TV and social) to deliver multiple sychronised messaging from the dual screening that is now common place, especially on live viewing.
Tom has joined us from a strategic planning background and really bolstered our senior level team to deliver the planning insights and solutions our clients need.
6. What is the innovation story associated with your new thrust with gmail marketing?
One of the new techniques has been to develop advertising within email streams which is still in beta test. The exciting thing is the detail of the targeting. We can actually see if a competitor to one of our clients has emailed a potential consumer, and serve a competitive ad underneath.
This has delivered some of the best click throughs and ROIs we have seen online to date.
7. Fetch has been acquired by Dentsu Aegis. What does this mean for you personally?
I was one of the founding shareholders and saw the potential of mobile early. I have now successfully exited.
8. You said your year on year growth figures are strong. What about 2015 – will it continue the trend?
Yes, we have gained the momentum with many new wins this year and look to build that next year as the performance positionning continues to resonate.
9. Anything I have missed. Your opportunity to have the last word.
It’s an exciting industry that’s developing all the time and great to have the agility to keep our clients future-proofed on the changes to both consumer behaviour and the impact on communications. This includes the ability to target by location and behaviour all the way through to payments on devices. We do this through intuitive, bold and vibrant solutions that deliver real cut-through results.
We are the performance agency. An award winning, vibrant and independent media agency.
Graphic by Waag Society