Catherine brings with her a touch of international class and luxury having spent over 12 years working for some of the world’s leading brands including Pernod Ricard owned Ballantine’s whisky, UBS and Airbus.

Most recently she was in charge of the LVMH account overseeing the production and delivery of their press, outdoor and TV campaigns across the UK for Dior, Givenchy, Guerlain and Thierry Mugler Perfumes.

Catherine has two small children, loves good wine and garden parties.

The Problem

Bathstore had a clear and simple goal. They wanted to become the bathroom equivalent of DFS.

They wanted to be the default choice for anyone looking to build or upgrade their bathroom.

Trouble was, Bathstore had a huge national retail network, but virtually no brand awareness. They’d never really done any advertising. As such, despite their sales success, it seemed that nobody had heard of them.

The Solution

At WFCA, our task was to create and build an entire brand from the ground up.

Clearly, there was more to the job than simply drumming up a few clever ads. We needed to position Bathstore uniquely in the marketplace, develop a strategy and then produce some effective creative work. We then used a full media strategy which included TV, outdoor, press, and in-store to drive everyone round/through the buying journey.

Our Approach

Through research, we discovered the insight that Bathstore was perfectly positioned as an alternative to both the small, expensive independents and the cheap but huge and impersonal big-box stores.

What Bathstore offered was choice and quality at a reasonable price. From this insight, our planning team went to work on an overarching strategic message that would drive the creative work over time and across media. The campaign line became “Now everyone can have a beautiful bathroom.”

Under this direction, our creative teams developed concepts all of which juxtaposed fabulous looking imagery alongside value-oriented scripts and copy.

Lines like “It looks even better with the price on” and “Satisfy the designer in you. And the economist.” worked to hammer home Bathstore’s unique selling proposition.

The Results

The results were simply stunning. Bespoke econometric model quantified ROI of £5+. What’s more, the model also proves our work was more effective than category norms to the tune of £40m over 4 years.

And as a final acknowledgement of the success of the campaign, Lord Kirkham, the man who famously founded DFS and grew it into a national success was quoted as saying “The best retail marketing in this country today is Bathstore’s”

Clearly, for WFCA, a job well done!

The Problem

Yazoo, the great tasting milkshake brand, had a problem. The days of easy growth were over as it was reaching saturation in its homeland market of Mums and kids.

Our Solution

To solve this problem we ran our Strategies for Growth programme which uses thorough qualitative and quantitative research to identify the opportunities. From this, we found the young adult market to have the greatest potential for uptake. Trouble was they thought the product was full of rubbish, fattening and aimed at kids. We had to find a way to speak in a different way, to a different audience and communicate the maturity of the brand and purity of the product – all without alienating or losing Yazoo’s traditional consumer base.

Having established that, we developed a new position around the theme of “Milk. Shaken Up” which actually became our main campaign line.

Our Approach

We began with an all-new packaging design that, while still appealing to the younger audience, had a definite appeal to the young adult market.

Our creative approach took the “Milk. Shaken Up” theme and rolled it out across all media from TV and outdoor to in-store promotions, online and experiential.

Our ads focussed on the fun and simplicity of the product and let the health messages come through subliminally. To do this we featured cows being fired out of cannons, jumping off diving boards and riding around the country on the top of a Volkswagen camper van.

The Results

The wacky, yet solidly on-message approach, resonated hugely with our new target audience. Awareness amongst young adults soared in mere months to fully 74%. Of those polled, 37% had tried the product or drank it regularly. In the first four months after the campaign launch, Yazoo generated £800,000 profit in Tesco alone.

In response to questions received we’ve already created this article, written by WFCA’s Senior Strategic Planner Fiona Murdock, on the second screen phenomenon. She uncovered revealing insights into how people are watching TV and the additional media they consume simultaneously.

Next week, our Media Director Chris Wright will be answering your questions on e-commerce

Please post your questions by Monday 14th May via our Facebook & Twitter pages or in the comments section below.

You can follow the conversation on Twitter using the hashtag #WFCAQA

The company pitched their global eCRM business to a number of agencies with WFCA securing the win.

The project is part of a wider business objective to increase the dialogue with its huge customer base and will use the Agency’s Buying Journey™ model to create highly personalised and interactive bi-monthly e-newsletters for 1million + contacts in 21 countries and 13 languages. The Buying Journey™ is WFCA’s unique strategic model designed to establish the greatest point of influence for each transaction type and increase response rates by using key purchase barriers/levers to fine tune creative and content to optimise consumer relevance.

CRM Manager Agne Domarkiene said of the decision: “WFCA has great experience working with Western Union and with e-newsletters in particular. (Our decision) was based on the quality of proposal, experience, excitement and value for money”.

A global leader in payment services, the Western Union® Money Transfer service is available in more than 200 countries and territories around the world, processing on average more than 1 million transactions a day.

This was the situation we faced with Patak’s paste and although paste users are eulogistic about the product it turns out that they just don’t use it enough – leaving it in the cupboard for six months and cooking the same curry every time.

We needed to shake things up with ads that stand out in the cluttered foodie press and excite consumers with new ways to enjoy Patak’s.

People had heard of them but knew little more than that.

Our ‘Plan’ campaign gave AXA a real problem solving role and by putting insight at the heart of the campaign neatly side-stepped the thorny issue of compliance.

However, in the UK it had low brand awareness, and many of those who were aware of the brand, didn’t know how to pronounce it!

What’s more cava in the UK is often seen as a ‘cheap’ sparkling wine although in reality it is made in the same way as champagne.

We developed a campaign that gave the brand a real sense of stature and a TV sponsorship strategy to tackle awareness head on.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Fiona Murdock investigates the second screen phenomenon gripping the UK’s TV audience. 

Jump to the video > >

British 40somethings grew up with 3 channels, on the one set in the house, with adverts watched because you actually had to get out of your chair to change channels. Advertisers could be pretty sure their ads would be seen: but despite this, the creativity and passion that went into these ads produced what’s seen by many as the “Golden Age” of advertising.

Then little by little, the likelihood of viewers seeing the ads we’ve sweated over has been eroded away. By the remote. By the video. By the proliferation of channels. And now the threat is multiscreening. Or meshing. Or layering.

In human speak, the second screen is about having the tv on, while you read Flipboard on your iPad and share the best bits on Facebook, your partner checks emails, and your teenager tweets.

Fiona Murdock talks about Second Screen

The Second Screen Phenomenon

To prove the point here’s what we are doing while “watching” TV:

• 62% of people surf ^[1]
• 38% use Facebook ^[1]
• 46% use a mobile ^[1]
• 38% use Facebook ^[1]
• 20% of 18-24 year olds tweet ^[1]
• 38% use Facebook ^[1]

Now, when the ads come on,

• 39% switch channels ^[2]
• 37% use the internet ^[2]

As more tablets arrive in UK living rooms, followed by Internet enabled TVs, the internet use figure will rise inexorably. In fact, the internet will come to feel like just another channel.

TV is Dead

So, “watching TV” is on a journey to being as anachronistic as “setting the video”, isn’t it? We’re not actively watching it, and when we do watch a program, increasingly it’s not on the TV. Incredibly (since this was sci fi stuff a decade ago) 39% of UK households watched TV content on a smartphone in 2011, while 14% used a tablet ^[3]. And given that children are the future and we should let them lead the way, let’s consider that among children aged 12-15, television is no longer the media most would miss were it to be taken away. Instead 26% now say they’d most miss their mobile ^[4].

So should we turn over budgets to creating a branded cat video for all our clients for their own YouTube channel? Or Pinning branded cakes on to Pinterest? How about a Facebook Spotify SoLoMo app? Sound good?

Long Live TV

No. It doesn’t. Because TV is not just another bit player in this layercake of media. It’s in the driving seat.

• 43% of 25-34 year olds have commented on a TV programme on a social media channela ^[5]
• In 2011 275 million people had ‘Liked’ a TV show on Facebook ^[6]
• 7 of the 100 most Liked Pages represent TV shows^[7]

In fact, nothing drives online activity like TV. This is as true for ads as for programmes. Our own econometric research has shown that there is a direct correlation between the broadcast of a client’s TV ad, and the resultant spike in search for their brand.

TV Drives Consumers Online

Online retailers have to invest in TV advertising. Without this, they’re just not going to get the visibility that drives web traffic. With 52% of UK viewers having shopped online while watching television ^[8], there’s a massive “instant click through” opportunity for online retailers clearly visible.

However, if your brand is a luxury product, or big ticket purchase, or you’re a bricks-and-mortar-focused retailer, TV definitely should be top of your media must haves too. TV is by far the most effective way to embed your brand and what it stands for in consumers’ minds – long term. The role of TV is to get them to engage with you there and then – online.

TV advertising in 2012 is still a huge opportunity to drive sales, to drive foot or web traffic, to build brand awareness and understanding. But to do this effectively, it’s not longer going to be about doing something funny, something outrageous, something sexy and hoping it sticks after three prime-time ad breaks.

It’s got to be deeply engaging, drive long-term memory encoding,  deliver low awareness processing, be talkable, and have the legs to take your message clearly and powerfully through multiple media channels.

Which a branded social cat channel on YouTube just can’t do.

The Challenge

The rise in social media chatter during appointment TV demonstrates consumers’ enthusiasm for engaging with TV content: in 2011, the most-watched TV programmes were live, national events, celebrity and talent reality shows. In short, talkable TV. The challenge for advertisers is to create ads as engaging, content-rich and talkable as the best and most popular TV.

Up for it? We are.

Written by Fiona Murdock, Senior Strategic Planner

Want to get in touch with WFCA?

Contact Nick Adams, New Business Director

Digital is the way forward in 2012, according to the Best Awards. The annual prizegiving of the Marketing Agencies Association honoured the best British marketing campaigns of the year in a ceremony hosted by comedian Russell Kane – himself a former copywriter – at The Brewery, London, on 1 March.

The judges agreed that the new media offerings were the stand-out entries across all of the categories. Some observers might have expected the campaigns to be lacking in creativity and innovation as agencies find themselves operating on a financial shoestring – but the teams found brilliant ways to meet their brief on a budget.

“Last year, the economic climate brought its challenges, yet the standard of work was certainly as strong as in previous years,” said Simon Tilden, chair of judges and Diageo’s global category director of advertising and ideation. “Brands are clearly seeking cut-through work and true consumer engagement; we especially liked work in the digital categories, where we saw powerful, innovative campaigns exploiting social media channels.”

One of those campaigns was youth agency Livity’s “Final Verse” for the NSPCC’s ChildLine service. It offered the target audience of young men the chance to feature on grime artist Devlin’s new track Teardrops by inviting them to write a last verse to the song and then upload a clip of themselves performing it. Entrants received a version of the video, including their contribution, and the intent was for them to help the campaign go viral: the video with the most hits, as well as the most meaningful lyrics, would be judged the winner. Combining creativity and interactivity, it picked up a trio of the top awards – Best Social Media Campaign, Best Consumer Campaign (as voted by Guardian readers) and the coveted Best of the Best Award.

Best Digital Innovation Within A Campaign and Best Creative Digital went to Iris for its use of social media and humour to promote Frijj milkshake to its young target market. The campaign centred on a game which asked people to view humorous clips on their computer while sitting in front of a webcam – if they laughed, facial recognition software recognised their smiles and they lost the game. The project team were also rewarded with Best Campaign By Agency Youth. Iris, now in its twelfth year of operation and more successful than ever, also picked up Best Creative POS Or In-Store Theatre for its work on the Orange Film To Go campaign, and crowned it all by being named Agency of the Year.

Judge and sponsor Stuart Wells, of Wicked Web, is confident digital marketing campaigns will only improve further in the future. “As digital continues to expand as a medium and become more fragmented and more complicated, the challenge for brand owners and agencies is to maintain focus on what’s important from the brief,” he says. “Throw in a dose of social media, mobile delivery and video, and the complete breadth of what full-service digital can do for a brand, and it’s no wonder there were so many different angles the digital entries explored.”

For truly excellent results, Wells recommends that agencies and creatives focus their efforts on using digital media appropriately, instead of casting their nets too widely. “The entries that scored most highly were those that effortlessly hung their brand communications around the appropriate digital channels, rather than forcing a message into all the channels at their disposal,” he explains. “Innovative, concise brand communications, delivered across the most useful digital channels in a way that embraced technology, won my vote – and, of course, backing that up with tangible analytics justifying campaign success and value.”

Judge Nick Adams, of WFCA, believes the opportunities digital offers to agencies are limitless. “There are no boundaries with digital: if you want something and it doesn’t exist, it gets invented. That’s essentially what digital is – a tool that allows innovation,” he says. “Each year, digital is becoming more and more important for marketing and advertising campaigns, and the term ‘digital’ now means much more than websites and email, which, of course, is where it all started.”

Adams is looking forward to seeing what agencies come up with in the future. “It’s impossible to predict where the digital age will take us,” he says, “but there will always be someone working out how to get the most out of each platform and each channel. Those people won’t always get it right, but it will be fun seeing what they come up with.

“The Best Awards are a great way of celebrating creativity across the whole marketing spectrum. It gives agencies and brands an opportunity to share success stories and amazing ROI, which helps inspire future campaigns and ideas – and sets benchmarks for us to strive to achieve better.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/best-awards/digital-shines-through