Over the last several years, Tel Aviv has enjoyed a significant rise in its international brand awareness. This is the result of a combination between a high media-profile (mainly due to geopolitics) and a significant internationalization of the city’s residents and business sector (due to development of its innovation economy).

While this rise has contributed significantly to the city’s international standing, it has yet to be translated into a significant rise in tourism figures (awareness has yet to drive demand for the brand). Tel Aviv’s brand strategy is to
further develop brand awareness through early adopters and to create a direct connotation between the city’s brand and tourism trends (including alternative accommodation, beach-city life, arts and culture, culinary scene, etc.).

A significant opportunity is the city’s combination of a developed urban scene and a world-class beach. This is unique in the sense that the world’s leading cities tend not to be located by the beach (or well connected to one) and
the world’s leading beaches tend not to be in urban areas. A second opportunity is the city’s winter weather- with a Mediterranean climate within a 5 hour flight of all European hubs.

The strategy employed in the “Lifeguard Tower Hotel” campaign included several different levels:

a. A decision was made to focus on earned international media, as opposed to bought media. The goal of the entire campaign was to generate international media coverage.
b. The composition of partners in the campaign was of organizational importance: it was decided at an early stage that the campaign would be in partnership with the national Ministry of Tourism, in order to allow for maximizing funds and resources.
c. As Tel Aviv is a city without a well-known international icon or monument, it was decided that the lifeguard towers are the best iconic representation of the cities city’s beach.
d. In addition to partnering with the national government, we sought a partnership with an international large scale
tourism sales site that could allow for additional exposure, but also promote hard-sale of tourism packages to the city (Hotels.com)
The overall objective of the campaign was to drive international media coverage regarding Tel Aviv as a winter destination. Extensive use of social media was incorporated as well. As Tel Aviv does not share a common language with any of its target markets, a decision was made to focus on Instagram as a predominantly visual medium.

The reason the decision to focus on generating international media coverage was taken is the fact that one of the city’s most important attributes in terms of international marketing is the large concentration of international media
in the city (due mainly to issues not regarding tourism). The overall marketing strategy of the city sorts out to leverage this characteristic which supposedly is a disadvantage, but could, with the right strategy, be of significant positive potential.

The overall results of the campaign included over 350 mentions in international media (with an estimated reach of hundreds of millions of people), as well as over 300 million impressions on social media and Hotels.com.

The campaign was covered by all main news agencies (this was a specific goal that was set, and they were invited personally to come cover the launch of the lifeguard tower).

The campaign was covered by Reuters, the New York Times, Travel and Leisure, Vanity Fair, El Pais, Le Monde, Le Parisien, The Telegraph, Die Welt, CNN, Daily Mail, Yahoo News, the Mirror, ARD, Fodor’s Travel O Globo, Le Figaro and many more leading international outlets.

The results of the campaign allowed us to double the goal set for overall international media coverage and online engagement for Tel Aviv for 2017.

For the last 20 years Star Alliance has taken people on journeys of discovery and enabled cultural connections around the world.

However, regardless of its 28 member carriers and more than 18,450 daily flights to 1,300 airports in 190 countries
— for numerous reasons, the Alliance itself was not being talked about as much as its member airlines were.

At a time when the travel industry is increasingly being defined by younger, more tech-savvy travellers with the power of social media to define and document transformational experiences, Star Alliance played an important supporting role when they could have been the star of the show.

In marking their 20th Anniversary, Star Alliance had an ideal opportunity to play a more leading role. Their ambition
was to highlight the scale and benefit of their network by celebrating the stories of their travellers as well as the connections and adventures the Alliance and its members made possible.

The campaign challenge was threefold:
1) To raise awareness of the first ever Alliance 20th Anniversary celebration
2) To create a unique cultural experience that brought out the Star Alliance member airlines relationship
3) Take viewers on a journey that would help them connect with those respective cultures and truly understand what
a unique local cultural experience would look like

These experiences were meant to be extraordinary, thereby appealing to both business and leisure travellers alike.

National Geographic and The Wall Street Journal came together for the first time in our history to create a content and media partnership with Star Alliance entitled ‘Connecting Cultures’.

The campaign was designed to leverage the best of both publications; combining WSJ’s brand (most credible for 29 years in a row), authoritative voice (39 Pulitzers), WSJ. Custom Studios (120 awards in the past 3 years), and access to influential leaders (reaching 2 in 3 C-Suites globally and 64% of frequent hotel guests), as well as National Geographic’s signature photography, travel expertise, social following (169.5MM+ Facebook followers, #1 media brand- Instagram, #1 Media house – Twitter) and audience (the most readers (9.6 million) driven to explore the world, 76% of whom don’t read any other travel title).

The strategy at the heart of our partnership was to build an experiential, digital and social programme that didn’t just talk about connecting cultures, but actually inspired new adventures that hadn’t been experienced before.
The “Connecting Cultures” campaign began with a worldwide ‘cultural experience’ competition hosted by National Geographic – offering 21 people the chance to become ‘Mileage Millionaires’. Asking audiences to upload and share photos and short description of their favourite cultural experiences, the competition attracted over 59,000 entries around the world- each looking to win one of the biggest prizes in travel history. Every entrant’s experience was
captured and shared on an interactive Cultural Experience Map hosted on the Star Alliance website. This online hub of searchable inspiration and memories was the perfect platform to align Star Alliance with captivating and personal
travel experiences.

Simultaneously, we launched a series of 5 stunning films built around destinations served by the five founding member airlines (Air Canada, Lufthansa, SAS, THAI and United) – each of which offered viewers a unique local cultural experience.

Fronting the film series was Robert Reid, a world-renowned National Geographic travel writer who, for over 20 years, has travelled the globe immersing himself in different cultures, investigating the whys behind how we experience the world and telling interesting, immersive stories that give his audience a new perspective. ‘Connecting Cultures’ saw Reid experience the extraordinary with a series of unique challenges from Muay Thai training in Bangkok to learning survival skills from the Inuit at the edge of the Arctic Circle.

Trailer can be found here: https://vimeo.com/228386063

The video series was amplified using unmissable executions across print, social and digital platforms.

Our shared passion for strategic storytelling and cultural exploration captured more than adventures — it also captured the imagination and attention of our audience.

We significantly increased engagement with Star Alliance, dramatically boosted the brand promoter score and were recognised with a Gold Lovie Award, the most prestigious and only truly pan-European award that honours the best of the internet.

A campaign that inspired readers to go on a new adventure and discover unique cultural experiences they never thought were possible
Statistics That Speak For Themselves:

Reach
1.3 billion reached globally across all paid, owned and earned channels

Engagement
Over 6.6 million website visits – Doubling our target
Nearly 60k validated competition entries, generating a rich mapping tool of cultural experiences
3.4 million interactions with mapping tool
2.2 million views of Connecting Cultures films, more than eight times our target
42k likes/comments/shares on Nat Geo’s social posts alone
Gold Lovie Award winner

Brand Impact
Brand equity tracking up 28%
Brand recommendation scores (Net Promoter Score): a 700% increase
Brand impression and Intention to fly scores @ 9 out of 10

Business Effectiveness
120k FFP referrals from the promotion – exceeding our target by 700%

During many years Helsinki Airport has been in a phase of strong growth both in terms of facility size and the number of passengers. The greatest majority of passenger increase has emerged from Asia and particularly from China. However, Helsinki Airport nor Finland is still not very widely known in China. The Finnish airport operator Finavia saw this as a major challenge and wanted to increase the awareness of both Finland and Helsinki Airport in a new and fresh way to consumers and media. Also, increasing the knowledge of Helsinki Airport as a leading and best-connected long-haul airport in the whole of Northern Europe to Asia, was a clear target to the global aviation industry to attract more business via HEL.

Finavia has put a lot of effort in improving the customer satisfaction at Helsinki Airport. A valuable proof of this was Travellink’s study which named Helsinki as the best airport in the world in 2017. Finavia wanted to see whether this result held true in reality. So, to prove the Travellink study, a Chinese actor and influencer Ryan Zhou was invited to live inside Helsinki Airport for 30 days and to test and evaluate all airport’s facilities and services. The aim was to receive feedback on Helsinki Airport’s overall performance from the passenger viewpoint and to find those issues that needed crucially to be improved, but also to create global buzz contributing to the awareness of Finland and Helsinki Airport.

A renown Chinese influencer and a TV-star Ryan Zhou was chosen as the key campaign figure and he moved to live in Helsinki Airport for a month. He faced daily challenges, tested the services at the airport and familiarised himself with lifestyle in there – just like Tom Hanks did in the movie The Terminal. The #LIFEINHEL disruptive content marketing campaign mixed reality TV, game shows and social media resulting in hundreds of hours of filmed material. The campaign was co-created with Gary Carter, one of the creators of the reality TV smash hit, Survivor.

The core of the content strategy was to share Ryan’s experiences in short daily videos on every screen to various audiences globally. Finavia wanted true transparency in Ryan’s communication, so no control or censorship was applied in the posts he or other key opinion leaders made on social media. If Ryan would have not liked his 30 days experiment in Helsinki Airport, he would have had a free liberty to leave on the next flight back to China.

The main objective was to reach extensively those Chinese consumers who were likely to travel to Europe or Finland in the near future.

In the final report, Zhu gives Helsinki Airport an overall rating 4,5 out of 5, giving security, safety and transfer times full marks. His focus areas of improvement lie in more terminal space, new services to come over language barriers and a larger supply of Chinese food. As a result, Finavia has confirmed that the new enlarged terminal space will include expanded food offer particularly on Asian cuisine. Helsinki Airport will also further add the amount of already existing Chinese customer service personnel.

Active PR seeding throughout the campaign period resulted in 485 media hits around the world with a total reach of 2 242 042 896 impressions.The campaign was well noted in the Chinese media and the influencers had a pivotal role in conveying the messages to wider audiences. The campaign generated 10 055 297 video views, 232 204 843 social media impressions and 96% of the campaign sentiments were positive. The campaign strategy was a huge success as the results proved earned media value worth EUR 17 283 296, accounting for 3 456 % over the set earned media kpi’s.

With the campaign, Helsinki Airport attracted positive buzz and succeeded in standing out from its competitors in a unique way. Businesswise a great win was that during the campaign, Finavia signed a contract with a new Chinese airline Lucky Air.

A language dies every fourteen days.

So how do you protect your language, when you are one of the smallest countries on earth? With only 50,000 people – and twice as many tourists?

The Prime Minister of the Faroe Islands recently asked Google to add the Faroese language to Google Translate.

Sadly Google ignored the request. So instead of waiting, we created the world’s first LIVE video translation service, calling it “Faroe Islands Translate”.

Since the initiative started in October 2017, it has been a huge success:

• Reach: + 1.400.000.000
• News stories: +200
• Web mentions: 611.000
• Countries: 182
• Translations: 1.3 millions
• PR ROI: 95.000%
• PR Value: EUR 20 million
• Media budget: 0

But what about Google? Well, we are now working together to officially add Faroese to Google Translate.

Botswana Tourism Organisation partnered with ITB Berlin as the first Sub Saharan Country ever to collaborate at the largest Tourism Trade show in the world. Although the partnership created multiple marketing and destination
awareness opportunities, as a country categorised as a “best kept secret”, BTO was looking for more innovative and lasting destination impressions than traditional outdoor and indoor advertising campaigns offered. The challenge
was to engage the 160,000 visitors on a 3 dimensional platform that was personally meaningful and interactive, whereby they could not only become engaged with the mission of “Tourism doing Good”, but also share the
message through social media channels for further reach.

Furthermore, as an organisation we felt that the global public perception of Botswana was directed solely at the luxury of safari travel market, and that the messaging of how Botswana’s tourism industry was contributing in a
large part to the conservation of many endangered species was not being recognised. By linking the very operators of luxury safari companies to important conservation work that they are doing, the public would have a greater understanding of their participation as travelers in the success story.

Lastly, the Tlhokomela Botswana Endangered Wildlife trust was set up under the umbrella of Botswana Tourism Organisation as a fundraising arm for all national activities in conservation, ITB was believed to be an excellent
global platform to unveil the Trust and possibly collect funds or donor recognition for its mandate.

ITB Berlin is saturated with advertising, and as a partner country with a smaller budget, Botswana Tourism Organisation risked becoming overshadowed by larger budget advertisers. The strategy to overcome this potential under-branding was to create an innovative campaign to compliment existing advertising.

Statistics from ITB showed that the South Entrance, coming from the underground and railway station was the most frequented entry into the 160,000 sq meter complex, with more than 60% of visitors passing through.

Traditionally the exhibition space in front of the South Entry was branded in outdoor advertising, such as posters, balloons and wording.

Botswana Tourism Organisation wanted to replicate the emotion of being surrounded by wildlife on a real scale. And therefore the strategy was utilise natural materials to assemble life size models of the key conservation species, the rhino to convey the emotion of standing in a herd of animals.

The structures were produced in Europe, but to capture the organic messaging of the tourism industry, each operation was offered the opportunity to “adopt” a rhino and brand the animal with messaging that demonstrates their organisation’s contribution to conservation and eco-tourism.

In order to capture and fortify the message of the rhino campaign, the rhino statues were created mobile and easily assembled, therefore they moved to feature in all major PR opportunities throughout the partnership period
including preITB Press Conferences, the official opening of the show and at the various Botswana stands in the form of miniture statues that could be designed at home. Furthermore, in line with public ownership of the campaign,
white rhinos were produced in life size and assembled during the major events for the public to sign their own message, reflecting their feelings – thus bringing the experience to life.

The plan is for the rhinos following ITB to either be homed in European offices belonging to the Botswana operators, or to return home for permanent display in Botswana Tourism Head Quarters, furthering reach and longevity of the
campaign.

• 37 life sized rhino statues were adopted by Botswana based operators and non-governmental organisations.
• 4 life size rhinos were fully covered with public signatures and messaging towards conservation, including a signature by His Excellency the President of Botswana.
• 1000 children’s rhino puzzles were adopted and designed by ITB visitors
• The Tlhokomela Trust received Euro 3,700 in rhino adoption fees and Euro 2,800 in donations.
• Over 47 rhino were relocated to the country in 2017, mostly through tourism operation contributions.
• Botswana Tourism Organisation has later recognised by WTTC, Tourism for Tomorrow as the sustainable destination of the year and received a further 5 international awards/recognitions as a destination.
• Botswana Tourism Organisation was offered a pro bono country rebranding campaign through UNWTO and CNN
• Task to cement the messaging of conservation success in destination branding with aim to launch at ITB 2018.

Workplace is Facebook’s business collaboration platform, and it launched to paying customers in October 2017.

Despite Facebook being the parent company, awareness of Workplace is low. To compound this, it is operating in a cluttered marketplace competing against tech behemoths, who bundle collaboration software, and specialist
solutions such as Slack.

There is a need to overcome buyer inertia and their tendency to stick with incumbent tech solutions and to do this we needed to drive credibility and deliver stand out from the likes of Slack, Yammer, Asana and G-suite (Google).

Furthermore, we had to convince our target audience of C-Suite, ‘visionary leaders’ across companies of 500-10,000 employees, that Workplace by Facebook is an effective Enterprise technology solution. Key geographies for this campaign were the US and EMEA.

The power of Workplace lies in its ability to connect people. It has a familiar interface – if you can use Facebook, you can use Workplace – that if embraced by a business, can give every employee a voice.

This was our starting point. Our own research showed us that CEOs believe company culture is critical to the success of their organisation; we needed to identify the type of visionary leaders that could see the potential of Workplace as a catalyst to stimulate and grow company culture.

With its disruptor mind-set, unique take on delivering global business news and mobile-first approach, Quartz would provide us with a concentration of the type of visionary leader we were looking for. Plus, with a large millennial
readership, we’d be able to leverage an important influencer audience.

Given a key objective was to drive credibility, we recommended a media partnership approach as with the right partner we would be able to leverage the trust between audience and media brand to the benefit of Workplace. Our
partnership with Quartz was fortuitously timed, as they were planning the launch of their new brand, Quartz at Work.

Quartz had noticed a trend over time that the content most engaged with on their site was focused on themes around the future of work, management and personal development. This was the perfect contextual environment
for Workplace and we worked with the team at Quartz to develop a programme that made Workplace the exclusive technology sector launch partner of Quartz at Work, along with a suite of branded content and native advertising that spanned three months and targeted US and EMEA.

For our Bulletin articles:
54,608 total article views and over a million integrated content placement impressions were delivered

There were over 50,000 interactions with our content, and a total of 1,164 clicks on our content

There were also close to 15,000 social actions, with over 7,000 social referrals.
We saw an incredible interaction rate of 289% on a Bulletin – that’s 90x the Quartz benchmark.

Daily Brief:
Our Daily Brief sponsorship beat Quartz’s own benchmark click-through rates:
2.51% in EMEA, 2.95% in Asia and 1.62% in the Americas

Open rates were also strong:
27.98% in EMEA, 20.84% in Asia and 26.12% in the Americas.
The campaign was a great success for Workplace and critically,our brand uplift study showed a huge 41% increase in respondents who associated Workplace with workplace collaboration tools. Amongst C-suite, VP, Director and
Entrepreneur audience types, association grew by 10%. Lead generation units such as infographics and whitepapers, also delivered an impressive 342 leads.
These strong results are proof that a strong brand partnership can deliver success for like-minded companies. It’s a partnership we hope will continue to develop and blossom in the future.

The smartwatch market is maturing but many consumers still don’t consider the product as an everyday necessity in their lives. There are two major barriers to market growth – cultural barriers and design barriers. Culturally it is not ‘mainstream’ to wear a smartwatch, and from a design perspective it is hard to distinguish between individual smartwatch brands – most look very similar and people are unsure of the unique features of different brands.

Within the smartwatch market Samsung were lagging behind Apple, both in awareness and market share (Apple 45%) so Samsung needed to not only educate people about their new product – the Samsung Gear S3 Frontier
Smartwatch – but showcase its unique capabilities beyond just fitness tracking.

To showcase these capabilities, rather than just talking about the technology in the Gear S3, we positioned it as ‘the ultimate survival companion’ – the indispensable tool for our target audience of adventurous world travellers.

To bring this idea to life, we needed a partner who had expertise in the great outdoors and who could transcend borders and cultures. Discovery stood out as the leading brand with a reputation for adventure and the outdoors
across the world. Their audience reached 44% of Samsung’s target users and they were 3 times more likely to have a strong interest in survival, adventure and the great outdoors.

But reach and affinity were not enough. We needed to demonstrate the product superiority of the Gear S3 in a credible and believable way. To deliver this credibility we negotiated and managed a partnership with the ultimate
adventurer and global explorer: Bear Grylls.

Samsung increased awareness of the Gear S3 by 45% and increased purchase intent by nearly two thirds. Thanks to Bear’s successful endorsement, viewers considered the Gear S3 116% more appealing.

This campaign also raised awareness of Samsung’s VR and 360 capabilities, with 1.2 million people viewing Bear’s VR Video content, which helped to positively position Samsung’s wider ecosystem to this audience of outdoor
enthusiasts.

When asked the reasons why they would buy the Samsung Gear S3, respondents suggested “extreme durability” and “ability to withstand extreme conditions”, which highlights how Samsung were able to showcase the true purpose of their product with Discovery and Bear Grylls, in ways other smartwatches previously could not.

As our campaign gained traction by the end of Q1 2017, the IDC (International Data Corporation) reported in their Quarterly Wearable Device Tracker that Samsung “led all companies in year-over-year growth, nearly doubling its
wearables volumes from a year ago”, specifically calling out the Gear S3 Frontier as a contributing factor to this progression.

Business Challenge
E.on needed to improve their share of the utility market. Awareness of e.on as an energy supplier was not a problem but differentiation was.

In line with the unveiling of their new range of environmentally friendly solar and storage products to customers in Europe, e.on needed a new campaign to communicate this shift in business strategy to core and new customers.

E.on needed to be considered as the ‘un-utility’ brand to and in turn re-engage a disengaged audience, giving them a reason to believe in the brand.

Business Context
E.on was known as pretty standard utility brand, with that came the commonly held poor perceptions associated with the sector and the ‘switch up’ effect that followed (loss of customer loyalty).

Before our partnership, they’d always focused on acquisition / price / brand awareness related campaigns. This got lost in the clutter of those ‘same-old’ utility brands, failing to build the brand and bring consumers in.

The audience didn’t perceive e.on as different from other energy suppliers or a likeable company.

Business Objective
To influence how people perceive e.on and become a distinct brand in a highly dense energy category through:
1. Shifting brand perception through promoting e-on as an enabler of amazing solutions (not just the supplier!)
2. Build awareness and consideration of e.on as an energy solution provider
3. Build awareness and interest in e.on Solar Energy and Drive (electrical vehicle solutions) as a proof point of their amazing solutions

With just 16% of the public (UK, Populus) viewing the energy sector in a positive light, e.on had an averse audience to try and turn around.

We needed to uncover what mattered most to the public to make the audience view e.on more positively and build brand.

Speaking to consumers on the issues that matter to them was the first step. E.on needed a diffentiator – moving from a perception that energy companies don’t operate in public interests to one that do.

Everyone uses power, so in this field anyone who is not a customer is a potential customer. This open field makes it all the harder to stand out.

Our insight showed that people are giving value to brands that help to shape their future and provide them with innovative solutions equalled with environmental responsibility.

E.on are innovators providing solutions that help for a better and more sustainable tomorrow such as Solar Energy, and their electrical vehicle charger – e.on drive.

By focusing on communications that tell these product stories, we would be able to excite our target audience who want to see brands balancing their pursuit of profit with the protection of the environment they operate in.
To shift perceptions of the brand and increase consideration, we set out to influence how people perceived e.on .

Through a brand stories content strategy we positioned e.on as a purpose-led brand focused on energy supply, renewables and energy networks.

Business

• Shifted perceptions of e-on as simply a supplier of energy to one of amazing solutions by 94%.
• Generated a massive brand uplift in campaign markets:
  UK(146%)
  DE(199%)
  IT(443%)
  CZ Rep(251%)
  SE(100%)

Media

• 100M views of the video content (Gorillaz partnership) reaching 78M people.
• 56m views of video content (e.on Drive campaign)
• Influencer content has reached to a potential follower of 26M and generating 460K social engagements with an ER of 2%
• The e.on Drive campaign has hit almost 2M engagement (social actions&link clicks) making clear progress to e.on becoming a considered brand and making e.on a likable brand.

Client testimonial
“We are delighted with the performance of our campaigns last year in collaboration with Vizeum. They used their expertise to help drive delivery of challenging targets to shift brand perception and engagement, driving innovation and optimisation at ever stage”. (Renze Lowrie, Brand Campaigns Manager, e.on)

All telco networks face similar problems: even though phones are people’s most cherished possession, telcos are increasingly seen as a commodity, exacerbated by the fact that the product is technically invisible.

Consumers often only care about their providers when phones aren’t functioning which makes branding challenging, especially for our youngest audiences.

In 2020, Millennials will comprise 50% of the workforce. But they’re an audience which is hard to engage: They seek engagement, participation and identity, and as is the case with many established brands, they are Deutsche
Telekom’s least engaged audience.

Millennials are bombarded with ads every day and it’s becoming increasingly hard for branding campaigns to have any effect. Given that Deutsche Telekom’s belief is “Life is for sharing.”, the challenge was to create a way to bridge this belief with the excitement Millennials are constantly seeking.
Telekom Electronic Beats, a music-lifestyle marketing program launched in 2000, exists to bridge this engagement gap but it only reaches a select segment of the Millennial audience.

In 2017 Telekom Electronic Beats’ goal was to build brand awareness for Deutsche Telekom within the hard to reach Millennial target audience.
We knew that Millennials are constantly attached to their smartphone, which is mostly used for music, videos and quick communication. Our challenge was to reach and engage with them on their mobile device through an
innovative and authentic way that also touched them emotionally.

Based on our findings on Millennials’ needs and media behaviour we knew it wouldn’t be enough to simply run a traditional awareness campaign.

We needed something that this specific audience would want to engage with.
Creating content that would appeal to them was a tough barrier but one that we would have to overcome if we were to hit our media goals of reaching this exclusive target audience.

Magenta becomes a content enabler

Deutsche Telekom has invested heavily over many years to make its brand colour, magenta, one of its most recognizable assets.

So, we decided to turn anything that was coloured magenta into an exclusive Deutsche Telekom media channel, using chroma-key technology – the same “green screen” technology used in broadcasting. This magenta-based
media channel would be accessible via our free app, The Lenz.

All the users had to do was point their phone at anything and everything magenta – walls, letters, clothing, etc. The magenta areas would then reveal exclusive content.

But the technology alone was not enough. We needed a partner who would be truly compelling with broad appeal, who could release exclusive entertainment material via The Lenz, making the app more appealing for our young
target audience.

We decided to partner with the world’s biggest virtual band, Gorillaz, who – our research showed – consistently attract a Millennial following because the band technically never ages. This combined with their virtual appearance
provided a perfect opportunity for Deutsche Telekom to offer a unique experience to consumers.

A partnership with a compelling band such as Gorillaz was risky because the brand could be overshadowed. But our strategy was to be the gatekeeper – not sharing the stage with professional performers, but making the band’s
unique and exclusive content available on all things magenta and enabling Millennials to discover their virtual world.

We therefore became an important facilitator for the partnership.
The Lenz app was the perfect solution to make Deutsche Telekom relevant to millions of European youngsters via their smartphones.

Our objective of engaging with a Millennial target audience was reached in just two weeks by capturing 14 million impressions, 2,700+ social mentions and, over 1Mio organic video views for both the teaser video “The Lenz featuring
Gorillaz” and our live virtual interview “In conversation with 2D and Murdoc from Gorillaz”.

The Lenz app is already on more than 130,000 phones across Europe and content shared at a 42% rate, which is above the 40% benchmark for sharing visual content on SM among Millennials. Also, more than 26% of installed
apps are abandoned after the first use but our target group opened the app (on average) nearly 3 times.

To date we have generated over 419 million impressions bringing the campaign CPM below 2,5€.

But more importantly we were present on everything from socks to iconic buildings, hijacking magenta wherever it was found.

We created millions of magenta portals to our media channel. Our youth audience could access this channel everywhere, at home or outside.

A hard to reach target started engaging with Deutsche Telekom in a unique way. Even ads from other brands who’ve had the audacity to use magenta became part of the Deutsche Telekom experience.

Overall, The Lenz gained a total earned media reach of €20m, being featured in Pitchfork, BBC, Rolling Stone and many more.

In EMEA an estimated 300 billion images were taken in 2016 (241 billion were taken on a smart phone). This new behaviour has had a significant impact on Canon’s hardware sales.

Canon and the camera category are facing a truly game changing challenge where consumers do not have the necessity to buy a separate camera, and tech companies (i.e. Google with Google clip etc) are bringing new AI driven
camera technology offering a different proposition to the consumers, cluttering the market with new competitors.

Hence, no longer were Canon the leaders of the imaging category, but they were challengers.

In addition to this, whilst their current core audience are typically older (35+ years old), Canon have identified a new audience, Adventurous achievers (16-34 yrs old, younger & adventurous) as a key audience to grow their business.
Whilst this new audience holds the key to success, they perceive Canon as niche, inaccessible, too hardcore and not a brand for “me”. Canon had lost touch with these audiences and required to build their brand amongst the noise and clutter of the imaging category.

This challenge required Canon to review their total marketing activity across their entire business and ensure that everything Canon did was consumer centric and focused toward the new audience but also capture opportunity with
the existing / in-market audience. This would range from their communications platform, to their website design, planning with consumer journey in mind, etc.

To spear head this evolution, a new brand proposition was created “Live for the story”. This is a mantra, it’s about living in the moment and embracing the now no matter how insignificant. It’s your story and it’s truly living for the
story.

Our challenge was to embed this proposition to our key audience and drive re-appraisal of the brand and relevance.

Live for the story is all about encouraging consumers to live life for their stories to tell and capture them. Canon has always marketed itself by championing the extraordinary moments captured beautifully by the professionals. But most people’s lives aren’t made up of extraordinary moments, and most of the images they have haven’t been beautifully captured. As a result, Canon doesn’t feel very relevant to them. Hence, to change this perception, we want to shift from Canon’s storytelling to consumer’s story telling – empower people to go out there, and share their experiences and stories behind their pictures.

Our media strategy reflected our new brand proposition hence all of our activity was under pinned by the three key strategic pillars:
Drive Stature & Scale – Reposition/generate reappraisal of our brand- reach is key to the right audience at the right time / moment
Emotion – Prioritise channels and executions which best support emotional communication
Storytelling – Storytelling at the heart of every channel choice and encourage engagement, aligned to our audience’s passion points.

In addition to embedding the new brand proposition to our audience, we required an “always on” strategy to ensure we captured those audiences that came to Canon’s site and drive further engagement to lead audiences to the
Canon ecommerce site for purchase. The new brand proposition would act as the catalyst to bring people to Canon but people searched and interacted with Canon across the year, not just when we have campaigns and we needed
to do this throughout the year, but Canon did not have the mechanism to cater for this consumer behaviour. Our always on strategy was to set up a prospecting and retargeting strategy to target our audience with personalised
messaging based on their onsite behaviour or purchase intent behaviour.

Canon was able to land the new brand proposition of “Live for the Story” across the key markets UK and Germany.

The social engagement platform was amplified by paid across UK and Germany, but ran across all of their 19 markets via organic activity on the Canon social sites. The transformation has only begun but has clearly landed the new proposition to the market with clear positive results across their campaign delivery and most importantly the increase in brand consideration across their key markets. The always on campaign has proven success with positive

ROI and high engagement rate capturing audiences coming into the category but also to those who were already interested in the brand and product.

This is only the beginning, but the first year has certainly made a mark on their journey to become relevant to our audience and grow their business.
The performance in UK and DE for the brand proposition:
DE- TV: 70.4% reach of 20-44s (+11% VS TARGET), Cinema: 1.4M admissions (+9% TARGET), VOD: 43.9M views (+41% VS TARGET), Digital display: 276M impressions (2x TARGET)
UK – TV: 72.1% reach of 16-34s (ON TARGET), OOH: 41 M impacts (2X TARGET), Cinema: 3.5M admissions (ON TARGET), VOD: 19M views (+12% VS TARGET), Digital display: 24M impressions (+55%VS TARGET)

Canon brand consideration across UK / DE / IT increased by 11%
For the 365 days of Summer – social engagement in DE / UK (share, likes, comment, clicks, completed video view) 8.3x vs. benchmark, Reach +57% vs. target, Over 16,000 competition entries (entries across 10+ markets)

Always on activity across the 6 european markets average ecommerce ROI (programmatic) = 2:1 ROI