Chief Marketer recently unveiled our esteemed PRO Awards judges panel, populated by heavy-hitters from some of the world’s top brands. This week they’ve provided insights on promotional marketing programs making waves in the marketplace; best practices driving results for their brands; influencer marketing success stories; and much more.

Chief Marketer: What brand—aside from your own—is doing promotional marketing programs that stand out in the marketplace?

Ekta Chopra, Chief Digital Officer, e.l.f. Beauty: There are so many incredible rockstar brands doing incredible work. Here are a few examples: Nike Just Do It,  Always Like a Girl, Old Spice The Man Your Man Could Smell Like, Tide Pods Challenge.

Denise Vitola, VP Brand Integration PR, Social and Influencer, Bayer Consumer Health: I recently was at the Cannes Lions Creativity Festival and was so impressed by many brands, but Heinz stuck out. I loved how they used human truths to arrive at a big idea. One that impressed me was the up-and-down Ketchup bottle. They uncovered in research that even though they reversed the ketchup bottle so ketchup fell to the top of the cap for easy release of the product, people still put it in the fridge upside down, so they put two caps on the bottle to avoid the issue. This idea rang true since my husband is guilty of not putting the bottle away correctly. It was a winner at Cannes. They also won with another campaign. They built off another insight they found where restaurants were refilling Heinz bottles with other ketchup to give the perception that they were serving Heinz.

Colin Fleming, EVP, Global Brand Marketing, Salesforce: What Warner Bros. and Mattel have done with the Barbie Movie promotion is nothing short of spectacular. It’s everywhere—in expected places—and more interestingly, in unexpected places.

Sarah Crockett, Global CMO, Dickies: There’s a lot of exciting work happening in the marketing field these days, and one standout to me is Claire’s. I am having a lot of fun watching how they are leaning in to reinvent themselves and enabling Gen Z and Gen Alpha (Zalpha) to take the center stage to help drive content, experiences and company strategies. They are also finding smart ways to incorporate AI in ways that drive value back to their consumer—their recent #Pierced campaign is a good example of that.

Linh Peters, CMO, Walgreens: The pivot that Airbnb has made to focus on their brand and purpose, and translating that into a meaningful and differentiated positioning, is fantastic. There is an authenticity and human connection that was previously not part of how the brand showed up.

Chief Marketer: What is the most exciting trend in promotional marketing today, and why?

EC: I get very excited thinking about the rise of personalized marketing. This is the practice of tailoring marketing messages to specific individuals or groups of people. This can be done based on a variety of factors, such as demographics, interests and past purchase behavior. Personalized marketing is becoming increasingly popular because it is more effective than traditional mass marketing, and when done right, it can lead to increased brand awareness, engagement, and sales. Other exciting trends include: experiential and influencer marketing, native advertising, video marketing, data-driven marketing… There is so much to untap!

DV: The most exciting trend in promotional marketing today is the Influencer/Creator. This trend excites me because it is a game-changer in reaching and interacting with consumers. And creators do more than post on their channels to promote products. They are now creating content for retail media, ecommerce, owned social channels, paid social and more. This content is platform-appropriate, relevant and relatable. I predict creators will take over 50 percent of work from ad agencies by 2025.

CF: I’m very excited about what generative AI can bring to promotional marketing. We’ve seen some inspirational traditional advertising efforts—like the Orange “Les Bleus” campaign—use it to highlight social inequalities. In the promotional sense, we can be thinking about real-time content creation and augmentation, which unlocks previously unbelievable experiences.

SC: Digital and growth marketing have been such a dominating force over the last decade. I love seeing how brands are taking what this field has taught us and using it in ways to marry the “old” with the “new.” Vans, as an example, recently launched a new campaign for their Knu Stack footwear launch and leveraged out-of-home, a media that has been arguably on the backburner for many years across multiple industries. They leveraged it in a hyper-creative way that obviously takes advantage of all the new technology that is available to us as creatives and marketers to pack a big and powerful punch.

Alia Kemet, CMO, Shipt: Years ago, social media felt like the wild west and in many ways, it still is. It’s interesting and exciting to see how brands are using their organic social channels to engage more directly and intimately with their customers in addition to all the ways social media doubles as an advertising platform. As marketers, we have the ability to test and learn on social media, to create content and revise it, and to try something out of the box and new, which I love. We’ve seen a huge spike in social commerce lately, and I think that will only continue to grow through the ever-growing social media landscape.

LP: Brands that are capitalizing on a consumer insight/moment to quickly bring a new product to market. It’s flipping the model of product development on its head.

Chief Marketer: What best practice or promotional tactic has driven results for your campaigns in the past year?

EC: For us, it’s all about being eyes.lips.first. That starts with community insights. We tune the e.l.f. in. We listen to what our community is saying and doing, and then we look for the signals to create our campaigns.

CF: Post-Covid, it’s been great to see the comeback of promotional and experiential marketing. But of course, people have evolved. They’re looking for more instant gratification and don’t have the attention span for long, drawn-out activations. This forces marketers to raise their game with strategy. Get to the point. Make it impactful. Don’t waste people’s time. And most importantly: build trust in your brand by doing so.

SC: Best practice #1 is a clear understanding of your brand’s unique value and how that can directly meet your consumer’s needs. The strength of our efforts can quickly get watered down when you try to be everything to everyone, but I firmly believe that you need to pick a lane, make clear choices on your unique consumer value and build strategies, plans and KPIs around that targeted zone. That doesn’t mean have one approach for all consumers, but rather augment your approach to drive more relevance, while ensuring that you hold strong on your unique position.

An example of a tactic that Dickies has deployed in this vein is with regard to our Dickies Skateboarding social media channels. We know that there is a robust consumer community that has an intimate relationship with skateboarding and who love our riders as much as we do. Segmenting our skateboarding social channels allows us to feed skate specific content all day, all night, to the most loyal skateboarding fans, vs. only embedding it within our larger Dickies social handles. We recognize that not all of our offerings are what our consumers are looking for, so finding a quicker way to get them what they want is always a goal.

Chief Marketer: Highlight how you’ve used one or more of the following to create standout promotional programs: Influencers; Brand Partnerships; Loyalty Programs. What made it a success?

EC: Focusing on our loyalty program, Beauty Squad, we have created a special program where our community is the first to have early access to product launches and exclusives (e.g. e.l.f. x America Eagle collaboration) plus receive exclusive rewards, promotions and incentives. Our goal is to create a truly omnichannel program where beauty squad members can get rewarded wherever they shop e.l.f. and know how valued they are to us.

e.l.f. Beauty Squad has 3.9 million followers and has been recognized two times as one of “America’s Best Loyalty Programs” by Newsweek, and we’ve scored above industry benchmarks for member engagement and member revenue contribution according to Oracle, our technology partner.

DV: I lead all influencer programs at Bayer and use this tactic often to reach our consumers with targeted programs and messages. We have seen much success in these partnerships. One example we recently executed with excellence was using the collab tool on Instagram, which resulted in even more chatter on social than expected. The program was for One A Day prenatal. We partnered new moms with experienced moms to chat about motherhood and insert our post and prenatal vitamins. The influencers loved the partnership, and so did their audiences. We used paid content, which performed well and exceeded industry benchmarks.

CF: We’ve partnered with Matthew McConaughey this year to highlight the “gold rush” happening in generative AI by asking the “right” questions of AI. Questions of trust, security, bias, privacy and data residency.

SC: I’m a big fan of brand partnerships. Partnerships allow you to see your brand through another powerful person or brand’s eyes, which can create a spark unlike any other. Earlier this year, Dickies had the pleasure of working with Ford and Sydney Sweeney, as an example. This was a unique trifecta that allowed all three partners to address a need in the market—an elevated and unique twist on workwear to cater to a consumer group that not only rolls up their sleeves and wrenches on cars, but also wants to be able to express themselves uniquely in the garage and out on the road. Sydney had a strong and sharp perspective on workwear needs for her and women in the garage, and we were proud to partner with Sydney and Ford to make this dream a reality.

AK: Consumers’ use of their favorite content creators, influencers, and VIPs has certainly impacted purchasing behavior and brand loyalty. They are looking to their favorites for product recommendations and, in some cases, spending advice. Shipt has tapped into this marketing tactic recently to partner with entrepreneur, actress and producer Issa Rae to star in our latest creative campaign and supporting programming.

Our partnership with Issa has ranged from product recommendations and an advertising campaign to a purpose-driven mentorship program for Howard University creative students. Through it all, we’ve been able to reach new audiences to introduce them to same-day delivery with heart. While the partnership just kicked off in June of this year, we’re already thrilled with the feedback and early results from our customers.

LP: We leveraged the myWalgreens loyalty program to create and deliver our first ever member exclusive “thank you: event that launched in stores and digitally July 23-29 for our 110M+ members. The event featured unprecedented bonus offers, personalized deals and accelerated reward earning opportunities that offered members the chance to earn three-months-worth of rewards in just a single week. This drove increased digital engagement and trips among members.

Chief Marketer: Where do you find your inspiration for your promotional marketing campaigns?

EC: e.l.f. is for EVERY eye, lip and face. We are a brand of the people, by the people, for the people and we create with the people. Our community tells us what they want from us, and this guides everything that we do.

CF: As a B2B company, we put great effort to draw inspiration from the leading B2C companies. For far too long, the B2B marketing world was held to a lower bar in terms of quality and caliber of work. Today, we believe that B2B should be held to that same bar and we’re living in a renaissance of B2B marketing.

SC: Easy…my team. I am a believer that good ideas come from everywhere, and I learn from and am inspired by my team every day. The creativity and ideas that they spark come from being diligent about having their eyes out in the field and their heart and passion on the brand. That combination is a powerful one and requires me to be a good listener every day.

AK: Good ideas can come from anywhere. At Shipt, we draw inspiration from the insights harnessed from first-party data, but also our children, our friends, the social media accounts we follow, and from our own industry. While looking for inspiration, it’s critical that my team and I have our ears to the ground—listening to cultural conversations, being mindful of consumer sentiment and news cycles—to create promotional marketing campaigns relevant to our targets, yet unique, exciting and appealing.

LP: I look outside of our industry to see what other brands are doing to drive brand awareness and engagement: brands that are clear in who they are as a brand and sophisticated in their understanding of the consumers, and then marrying that with what’s culturally relevant.

The post PRO Awards Judges Panel on Promotional Marketing Best Practices and Trends appeared first on Chief Marketer.

Got a promotional marketing campaign from the past year that you’re super proud of? Then we have just one simple question for you: Why wouldn’t you want to get your best work in front of this panel of judges?

The jury for this year’s PRO Awards, the industry’s largest and longest-running recognition program for B2C and B2B promotion marketing, is stacked with CMOs and high-level marketers from the likes of e.l.f. Beauty, Dickies, IBM, Disney Parks, Walgreens and Bayer.

Their brands are household names because they’ve mastered the art of promotion marketing. And come next week, this crew will share their thoughts on industry trends, best practices and stand-out brands in the marketplace. Get your work in front of them today.

The post 2023 PRO Awards: Call for Entries appeared first on Chief Marketer.

Among this year’s 38 gold winning programs: Advance Auto Parts’ “DieHard is Back” campaign for Best Brand Awareness; Petmate’s “National Fetch Day for Best Campaign on a Budget; NAACP’s 111th Convention in the Best Diversity program category; and Amazon Web Services’ DeepRacer League for Best B2B Campaign. Pringles’ and Adult Swim’s “Trapped in Advertising” took away the event’s biggest award when they were named the Platinum PRO winner.

The winners were revealed during a virtual gala on August 4, where we raised a toast to the winners and enjoyed inspired conversations led by industry leaders. Go here to peruse all the campaigns. Congrats!

The post 2021 PRO Awards Winners Announced appeared first on Chief Marketer.

The winners were announced September 2 during the first-ever PRO Awards virtual celebration attended by hundreds of marketers from across the country… straight from their living rooms.

Ally Financial and PrizeLogic snagged the highest honor, the Platinum PRO, for their Ally + MONOPOLY – Grow Your Fortune campaign. The 360-degree program took augmented-reality gamification to new heights—and achieved massive scale.

This year’s PRO Awards received hundreds of entries from around the globe and was judged by a panel of brand-side marketers. Companies across a variety of industries took home top honors, including State Farm, Michelob ULTRA, Ford, Under Armour and HP, Inc.

Click here to view the case studies for all of this year’s winners and finalists.

Missed the broadcast? Watch it again, or sign-up for the first time and watch it here.

The post 2020 PRO AWARDS Winners Announced at Virtual Celebration appeared first on Chief Marketer.

1. Champion an Underdog

Cheetos has a way of inserting itself into pop culture in a cheeky way. For instance, the brand once created a perfume called “Cheeteau,” named after its brand icon, Chester Cheetah. So, when it came to finding a way to associate itself with the Olympics in a way that caught the attention of Millennials, the brand used the underappreciated sport of curling as its promotional platform. Because if anyone knows about (cheese) curls, it’s Chester, right? The brand created a limited-edition product, Cheetos Curls, and concocted a curling victory dance performed by NFL stars in a fun music video. Sure enough, “doing the curl” caught fire as the cheer of choice for the sport, and in doing so raised an underdog sport—along with the brand—to social media viral status. Agency: The Marketing Arm

2. Hyper-Local Fan Engagement

Bud Light found a way to cultivate brand love with local Cleveland Browns football fans by offering them free beer—but only if, and when, the team actually won a game. The brand installed 37 “Victory Fridges” that opened when the Browns won their first game in nearly two seasons. Thanks to influencers and media coverage, the fridges—locked with actual chains (and digital locks)—became a subject of conversation each week. By unlocking this treasure trove for local fans at just the right moment, the brand tapped into a collective desire shared by a very specific group of locally-based consumers. Agency: Fusion Marketing.

3. Scarcity as a Buzz Builder

A sure-fire way to create demand for a product or service is to make it exclusive. Cheetos did just that with its Flamin’ Hot Spot restaurant, which featured 10 signature dishes inspired by its Flamin’ Hot Cheetos product and crafted by locally-based celebrity chef Roy Choi. The pop-up lasted just three days and, most importantly, its 500 online dining registrations sold out within an hour. (Not to mention, 9,755 others were waitlisted.) The attendance of dozens of influencers and celebrities added to the buzz as well. Agency: The Marketing Arm

4. Immersive Product Demos

For Uber’s urban aviation division to make its flying car concept a reality to stakeholders from a variety of industries, from aviation, government, investment and technology, the brand needed attendees to truly visualize the technology—one that’s essentially yet-to-be-created. The solution, employed by the Infinity Marketing Team at the 2018 Uber Elevate Summit, was a collection of hands-on, immersive experiences, including a “Model Garden” showcasing the first flying car reference models developed by partners across the industry. Most impressive: Attendees could take a virtual reality ride in a full-scale eVTOL (Electric Vertical Take-Off and Landing) vehicle by Bell Helicopter, which brought to life the feeling of flying above traffic.

5. Co-Created Content

To engage festival attendees at Coachella and Panorama in a fresh way, HP and Intel reimagined its long-standing footprints at the events by creating a “Digital Eden” in which festivalgoers could create their own shareable digital art pieces. Touchpoints included a “Hydration Art” station where attendees could design their own water bottle labels, create light painting that became a shareable GIF, and experiment with flower “bloom art” controlled by an HP digital stylus. Through interacting with HP’s products, festivalgoers became artists themselves—with takeaways to prove it. Agency: Infinity Marketing Team

6. Civic Engagement

Country Time Lemonade caught wind of something seriously sinister happening in cities across the nation: Kids’ lemonade stands were being shut down in some cities due to not having the proper permits. Realizing that this was not a positive development for the rite of passage that is the lemonade stand, nor likely to help Country Time to continue playing a part in this tradition, the brand set up a national “Legal-Ade” campaign to help play off fines and permitting fees for those young entrepreneurs. It even inspired real change in one local Denver market, where a bill was introduced to overturn the lemonade stand law altogether. Agency: Marketing Werks

7. Mini-Music Festivals

A new trend is popping up: the mini-music festival. Some younger consumers are forgoing large music festivals for more intimate, specialized events. W Hotels capitalized on the trend with its global hotel music festival to showcase the benefits of being a member of the Marriott Bonvoy loyalty program. For two days, W hotels in Hollywood, Barcelona and Bali offered performances that were then live-streamed on Marriott Rewards’ social channels. Adding to the festival vibe were VIP upgrades and experiences; food and beverage tie-ins like Shake Shack; and fitness opportunities. Agency: IMG Live

8. Macro + Micro-Influencer Approach

Micro-influencers are all the rage these days for their ability to produce and prioritize meaningful brand engagement that sometimes trumps the reach enjoyed by macro-influencers. But let’s face it: It’s hard to ignore that macro reach. Enter Sunny Delight, which utilized both micro- and macro-influencers in its SunnyD Boldly Original Campaign to drive awareness and household penetration. The macro-influencer portion used well-known personalities to share what makes them “boldly original,” while micro-influencers helped ramp up an Instagram contest among consumers to show why they, too, were boldly original.  Agency: Sunflower Group and 360PR+.

9. Multi-Sensory Experiences

More and more, experiential marketing is embracing the five senses. In the case of the Netflix film “Bird Box,” the promotional platform centered around a mobile activation in which attendees were blindfolded—mimicking the plight of the main character in the film, played by actress Sandra Bullock—while being pummeled with terrifying sounds, vibrations, special effects and voiceovers within a vehicle made to look like the set of the film. Across its 23-day tour, the activation’s visceral experience entertained 2,500 visitors without any publicity ahead of time. And the results speak for themselves: The film was viewed 45 million times in the first week alone. Agency: MC2

10. Craft Personalization

Experiences that are memorable for attendees often feature an element of personalization. To promote Universal Thread, a new women’s denim clothing collection launching at Target stores across the country, the retailer created an experience in 250 locations that allowed shoppers who purchased the brand’s products to have personal messages embroidered onto the articles of clothing by a team of on-site tailors. Cute, quirky iron-on patches in the shape of avocados or cacti were handed out, too. The personalization strategy paid off for the brand: Stores that participated enjoyed a 74 percent higher lift in sales, 145,000 patches were distributed and approximately 750 garments were custom-embroidered. Agency: Grow Marketing

The post The 10 Best Promotional Marketing Ideas of 2019 appeared first on Chief Marketer.

As the deadline for this year’s competition draws close (enter now—Friday, March 23 is the deadline), here’s tips you can steal for your own shot at PRO Awards glory.

Tip #1: Use video to build awareness—and sales.

Aramark isn’t exactly a household brand, but people all over the country have utilized their food, facility, hospitality and uniform services at schools, stadiums and numerous other venues across the country.

New client Yosemite National Park provided Aramark with the perfect opportunity to build a campaign that would showcase their work for potential clients—and win PRO Awards gold.

To capitalize on all the attention the National Parks Service was about to receive surrounding its centennial, Aramark created videos explaining the services it provides to various parks beyond food and uniforms, such as running tours, creating waste-management programs, and implementing water-conservation efforts.

The videos were integrated into social channels, and sales and marketing teams were trained to use the content as a jumping-off point for initiating or continuing discussions with prospective customers. Programmatic technology helped target specific business niches.

On August 25 along, the National Park Service Founder’s Day, Aramark’s Facebook ad was viewed by more than 1 million people, making it the most-shared post in the company’s history. During the campaign Aramark’s website traffic was up 15% year over year, while the number of leads rose 25%.

Tip #2: Engage prospects with interactive content.

To drive leads and build prospect profiles, video platform Vidyard partnered with SnapApp to create the Silver PRO Award winning Video Maturity Model.

A two-minute assessment was created to outline four stages of video maturity, from beginners just starting to use video, to masters effectively utilizing both internal and external video teams. SnapApp was integrated with Vidyard’s instance of Marketo to feed the data into Salesforce.

After a first touch, users were invited to take the 15 question assessment via email, social, SEM and content marketing initiatives. They could then fill out a form to get their “video marketing scorecard,” and could watch a video about their rank. The Vidyard sales team was routed qualified leads from the campaign and followed-up to offer actionable advice. Anyone that sales didn’t follow up with was added to an email nurture program.

The 2-minute assessment had 2,890 unique views, 811 form submits, and a completion rate of 67%. The campaign in its entirety has generated more than 1,000 inquiries and over 800 qualified leads for the sales team, and influenced more than $650,000 in qualified pipeline and over $100,000 in closed revenue within 3 months, with a less than $10 cost per lead.

Tip #3: Inspire with multichannel, integrated content.

Microsoft faced the challenge of driving registrations for the five day Ignite 2016 event in Atlanta via demand gen, with no paid media. The integrated nurture campaign over the 10 months leading up to the event did just that, and snared the B2B bronze PRO Award.

A strong focus was placed on timely messaging and relevant themes delivered through owned and earned channels, with a plan built around event milestones and available content. Registration toolkits were created for internal and external teams, sales teams, company partners, event sponsors, and registered attendees.

A full audit of all Microsoft Ignite social channels established best practices and created a strategy to build engagement. A campaign theme and style guide for the 2016 event was created and used not only for social and digital advertising but a direct mail “ninja papercraft” design as well, to generate organic buzz.

Email was the best performing tactic at driving registration. Via social, the community responded well to a cast of recurring characters designed to surprise and delight, so the audience was invited to choose their favorite to grace the official event T-shirt.

Nearly two months before the event, 23,000 attendees were secured, making 2016 Microsoft Ignite event the largest in-person Microsoft event of all time.

Are you inspired yet? Enter the 2018 PRO Awards competition now!

The post PRO Awards Confidential: Why Aramark Won B2B Gold (And You Could Too!) appeared first on Chief Marketer.

The company—which provides food, facility, hospitality and uniform series to a variety of schools, stadiums and other venues—took top honors in the Best B2B Campaign category for “Powering Experiences at Our National Parks.” The campaign combined video, social and digital elements to spotlight the services the company provides to Yosemite National Park.

Silver honors in the B2B PRO Awards category went to Vidyard, for its Video Marketing Maturity Model & 2 Minute Interactive Assessment initiative, designed to engage prospects looking to up their video game.

An integrated campaign Wire Stone created to promote registrations for Microsoft’s 2016 Ignite event in Atlanta was awarded the Bronze B2B prize.

The awards were presented Tuesday at a gala luncheon during Leaders of Brand Activation.

For profiles of the B2B winners and all the 2017 PRO Award winning campaigns, click here.

The post Aramark Wins Top B2B Honors at PRO Awards appeared first on Chief Marketer.