A quick flick through the campaigns, brands and individuals scooping the top awards this year underlines the importance of two marketing basics.
1. Content
You’ll be hard pushed to find a winning campaign from this year’s awards that hasn’t got a decent piece of content at its heart. Obviously this is true for the campaigns collecting trophies in the content category. But winners in categories as diverse as social media, the best website, the best limited budget campaign and the best internal audience campaign (and pretty much every other category on the list) all had compelling, relevant content front and centre.
And it stands to reason. Companies that have experienced positive returns from marketing automation initiatives, for example, have done so by sending out interesting content. Similarly those companies that best influence the C-suite, SMEs or their international customers, are all using content as their battering ram.
We’re moving into an era where a brand (and specifically its marketing) can be judged on the content it fires out. So I, for one, was pleased to see those thinking about content being rewarded last night.
2. Integration
Marketers shouldn’t really need reminding about the importance of integration. It’s only natural the ‘newly’ empowered buyer expects to encounter joined-up messaging across their chosen platforms (be they digital or analogue).
That’s why silo-ed categories celebrating things like PR or direct mail campaigns can sometimes undersell the winning campaigns slightly. Yes, the winners and runners-up of these categories have produced successful examples of PR or direct mail etc. But they have done more than this, really.
In order for their PR campaigns or direct mail campaigns to produce the desired effects, they have had to think about user journeys, context and complimentary touch points. They have done much more than write a press release and press send or produce a nice leaflet and stick it in the post.
These awards celebrate integration, segmentation and (as highlighted previously) the use of credible content, as well as the specific discipline written on the trophies.
Conclusion
The winners of these awards would not have stumbled away from last nights after show party clutching trophies had they not created excellent content and used it effectively across a range of complementary channels.
So, if you want to be among the winners next year, or if you just want to make sure your campaigns succeed, you could do a lot worse than thinking about content and integration.