Selecting the campaigns
How did we choose which campaigns would feature in this book? It wasn’t easy. To begin with, we drew up a shortlist of more than 100 campaigns from a variety of sources.
These included industry award nominations, campaigns that had generated significant levels of online buzz, submissions by readers of UDM, and of course those campaigns that had really resonated with each of us over the past year or two.
Understanding the challenge and applying practical solutions
From the outset, we wanted to see campaigns that didn’t go crazy by creating unsustainable and awkward engagement models. We also looked for evidence that the agency completely understood both the product and the proposition, but more importantly had produced work that was relevant and practical to a digital world. Rather than see a digital strategy for the audience, we wanted to see a strategy for the digital audience – if that makes sense.
People really like examples. That was one of the key themes that emerged as the feedback from the book flooded in. While UDM offers a comprehensive overview of the digital marketing space and the various opportunities digital presents for brands and businesses, the message from you, our readers, was that you wanted to see more examples of how brands and businesses were using these digital technologies and techniques to engage more effectively with their customers in the real world.
As marketers, you wanted to see more case studies. While finely crafted chapters on web analytics and neatly woven prose explaining search engine optimization offered a necessary and useful foundation of digital marketing knowledge, marketers tend to have a strong interest in seeing how digital campaigns are constructed and how brands are applying the theory in real situations.
Innovation and clever use of technology
This is a throwback to when Damian created the Golden Spider Awards in 1997 and the Digital Media Awards in 2002 (both still giving gongs) – the same criteria were used then. Ultimately we were looking for something that pushed the digital boundaries by being achingly smart. Without reinventing the wheel we wanted something that made us wonder ‘why hasn’t anybody thought of that before?’
Creativity and presentation
The standard of presentation was another important factor. Online and mobile channels impose certain creative constraints but also offer possibilities. What we wanted to see here was campaigns that made you sit up and perhaps even utter the magic words ‘that’s cool
Return on investment
While many still feel the internet is a direct response medium (most of the traditional agencies who are still lurking on the periphery of digital) and should be judged purely on percentiles and financial returns, others, ourselves included, feel a bit differently.
Whether the return on investment (ROI) was in fact sales, profit, market share, new customers, or brand awareness, we wanted to see engagement. In particular, we wanted to see campaigns that emphasized engagement from the very outset and understood that digital marketing was a method to achieve this
Last word
This is the overall ‘wow!’ factor – that unquantifiable something that resonates at a subconscious level. Ideally, we wanted to see advertisers breaking the mound, especially if they were relatively new to digital marketing or trying new techniques
