DMA Awards: channel winners showcase - a round up

We learned from the best of the best and enjoyed a morning of coffee, pastries and all that goes into some of our industry’s finest campaigns, with insight from big brands and award-winning agencies.

Mindful Monsters

Kicking things off - Claire Whitney, supporting marking manager, Scope and Janine Chandler, Good Innovation who discussed their Mindful Monsters campaign.

Mindful Monsters won big at last year’s DMA awards taking home Golds for Best Creative Solution, Best Launch Campaign and Best Health and Wellness campaign. It also won Silver for Best Charity campaign.

Scope’s main objective was to recruit regular donors at scale and diversify supporter acquisition sustainably. They needed a big idea - something to attract a new audience that was genuinely insight lead. Good Innovation paved the way with research, which showed that that parents with primary school children wanted to build their children’s resilience, and teach them kindness and compassion.

From this research came the idea of providing parents with mindful activities to build children’s life skills and create family moments. Soon enough Mindful Monsters was created, a pack of seven activity cards inspired by mindfulness, which focuses on relaxation, positivity, concentration and creativity.

The cards used quirky and creative visuals of the monsters to demonstrate the activity, bringing together copy and design to create a richly varied experience, as donors worked through the monthly deliveries of cards. With the monsters established, the product was developed to make the cards collectable; introducing a parent guide and surprise and delight mechanics like stickers and a collector's box.

Mindful Monsters delivered improvements versus Scope’s core channel of face to face across both cost efficiency and quality: the cost per new regular donor was 75% lower, and retention levels were nine times better: 95% of responders are new to Scope, and signs ups were 33% higher than predicted in the first three months, with parents feeding back that using Mindful Monsters has worked with their children.

Crème Egg Hunting Season

From charity to chocolate. Next up, Neale Horrigan, executive creative director, Elvis and Camilla Yates, planning director at Elvis discussed their award-winning Crème Egg Hunting Season campaign.

Rather than letting the fact that Creme Egg would only be on the shelf for a few months of the year limit the brand, Elvis used it to drive desirability, and crucially, urgency to purchase, by inventing a whole new season: Cadbury Creme Egg Hunting Season.

Each touchpoint created within the campaign had a clear role to play, from a Crème Egg café, a hunting lodge that toured the country to illuminating the London Eye in Crème Egg colours, told separate chapters of the same overarching story of Creme Egg Hunting Season. This enabled Cadbury to drive top of mind awareness and maintain active emotional engagement throughout the campaign.

By turning the product's commercial season into an event, Elvis were able to present it in a way that would simultaneously entertain and drive sales, as well as celebrate Creme Egg's extreme fan-base.

A Solar Collaboration

Finally, we heard from Polly Jones, client managing director at Engine alongside Emma Inston of brand and marketing communications, E.ON. Emma and Polly spoke about their best brand winning campaign: A Solar Collaboration. Emma explained E.ON’s need for a fresh approach: in the dull world of utilities, E.ON needed to become un-utility.

Engine knew that the brand had some great stories to tell - smart, innovative, exciting products that were genuinely shaping a better future, but if the storyteller was a conventional energy company, delivering them through traditional channels, the spark died and interest waned. So, Engine decided to bring E.ON into a media that consumers were already consuming, and tell its stories in a completely unconventional, un-utility way. For the first time ever, a utility company would be a relevant part of popular culture.

Engine approached Gorillaz, a band who champion sustainability and epitomised innovation. With Gorillaz on board, Engine turned to E.ON's host of new products, starting with their pioneering solar and battery storage technology. At the heart of the campaign, the team created an online film, set to the aptly names track 'We Got The Power' from Gorillaz new album. It was a music video unlike anything fans had seen before; a music video powered entirely by the sun.

The team also created the truly instagramable 'E.ON Kong Solar Studio', a solar powered recording studio, based on the band's original Kong Studios, and kicked off a tour of European festivals at Gorillaz Demon Dayz Festival in Margate.

Fans soon shared the video organically and thousands more visited the Kong Studios at Gorillaz Demon Dayz Festival in Margate. This resulted in a huge 146% lift in brand interest and a 97% lift in creative interest in the UK, with even higher spikes in other markets such as Italy which saw a 443% increase in brand interest and a 243% increase in creative.