Best use of creative in a B2B marketing campaign
Winner: Canon UK
Agency: Tidalwave
Campaign: Diet
The objectives of the campaign were to educate the audience about how much they were paying for colour printing on their existing desktop laser printers and to demonstrate the cost savings possible by deploying a balanced print strategy. Tidalwave aimed to encourage customers to formalise a print strategy and encourage consideration of Canon’s new colour multifunctional printers (MFPs). The target audience was 35,000 IT managers and finance directors in medium-sized organisations with 100-500 employees.
As deliberations about printing are not usually very exciting, the campaign needed to make the dull interesting and the complicated simple. The solution was to use the analogy of diet and illustrate the campaign with pictures of brightly coloured sweets and other healthy and unhealthy foods such as apples and chocolate cake. The importance of a good diet is high in the public consciousness and a compelling message for anyone who feels they should be a little healthier. High calorie snacks were equated with unhealthy expense and low calorie food with economy and efficiency. Both related directly to the health of the business and the bottom line.
Desktop lasers were therefore high calorie’ and users were encouraged to employ a healthier print strategy incorporating lower calorie’ multifunctional printers (MFPs). The key campaign proposition was the message all things in moderation’. The argument was that while desktop lasers are okay when employed as part of a healthier print strategy, they are bad for the bottom line if overindulged in. The Diet’ campaign encouraged decision makers to view their businesses as they would their health and urged them to eat healthily and stay in shape.
The integrated campaign was made up of a combination of emails, low value and high value DM pieces, online advertising and sales incentives all of which carried images of colourful food. The waves of activity were planned over a five-month period to keep reinforcing the message and ensuring that prospects would be targeted several times with multiple touch points.
The campaign was launched with a teaser email to all 35,000 contacts, followed by a 2D jelly-bean-covered mailer. The mailers were sent in phases to allow for telemarketing follow up. The top 5000 potential customers also received a 3D mail pack containing a box of jelly beans in 50 different flavours to test their willpower. The aspect of Diet’ which has the connotation of shedding pounds was emphasised by punning weight and cash (£s and lbs). Top customers were offered £500 cashback on every purchase with free print management software to keep the pounds off.
Four versions of the online banner creative also drove the audience to the site, each of which was produced in MPU, skyscraper, leaderboard and banner formats. These were rotated to ensure variety for regular visitors. Using the eye-catching images of brightly coloured sweets, the creative was designed to standout and intrigue visitors to the traditional business and IT orientated sites as well as to link to the offline creative.
In addition, a game format for the expandable leaderboard encouraged interaction. Users navigated a hungry monster through a track of fatty food and fruit. If they ate too many treats they lost the game and were encouraged to click onto the campaign page to learn about how to adopt a healthier print strategy for their business.
Canon had a budget of £350,000 for the campaign, £100,000 of which was spent on online media and £100,000 on the sales incentive including prizes. The remaining £150,000 was spent on creating the deliverables and production.
To date the activity has generated over 1200 leads amounting to a revenue pipeline of £7,296,000, which is predicted to convert to £2,188,800 in sales. The direct sales teams and reseller channel have also generated 644 actual sales equating to £5,150,000 revenue. When the competition application was made the campaign was still running but was tracking at a 108 per cent sales target while the campaign page had received over 155,000 unique visits.
Amy Budd, head of CBS communications for Canon UK, says, “The web strategy has far surpassed all previous campaign results and we have seen a 16 per cent response rate on the jelly bean mailer which is unheard of. We have also had excellent feedback from channel partners and sales, who as you know are a cynical bunch!”
