2011 Silver IT/telecommunications

Client IBM

What is wonderful about this work? We needed senior business decision makers to associate IBM with analytics by leveraging Wimbledon via a ‘seeing is believing’ approach. We used five years’ tennis player history to create win/lose predictions. Our $7.2m projected revenue represents an ROI of £27 for every £1 spent.

What details of the strategy make this a winning entry? One of IBM’s biggest challenges is to be seen to offer software and analytics solutions, rather than just infrastructure, particularly among senior business decision makers (BDMs) outside the IT community. We know that communicating what software does can be difficult in conventional media, so we chose an animated visual approach, in a channel that reached BDMs effectively. The new Executive Channel media met all our criteria, with digital screens in 80 large offices around London and an average dwell time of 40 seconds. We also took advantage of the strong public interest in Wimbledon when it was most likely to be top of mind. We used Wimbledon to make analytics interesting, along with a channel that could deliver a ‘seeing is believing’ demonstration of software in action and a can’t-miss BDM channel that only needed 40 seconds of their time.

How did creativity bring the strategy to life? Analytics were at the heart of the idea, predicting the likelihood of players winning or losing. We achieved a staggering 75% accuracy – powerful proof of IBM’s strength in analytics. IBM analysed the last five years of top tennis players’ match data to generate three unique keys to victory for every player. By continually monitoring this data during the two weeks of Wimbledon, we presented these predictions in real time. The execution took full advantage of the media to visually present just enough top-line tennis data to intrigue the audience, without oversimplifying the technology. Match predictions were also tailored to the media using

How did creativity bring the strategy to life? Analytics were at the heart of the idea, predicting the likelihood of players winning or losing. We achieved a staggering 75% accuracy – powerful proof of IBM’s strength in analytics. IBM analysed the last five years of top tennis players’ match data to generate three unique keys to victory for every player. By continually monitoring this data during the two weeks of Wimbledon, we presented these predictions in real time. The execution took full advantage of the media to visually present just enough top-line tennis data to intrigue the audience, without oversimplifying the technology. Match predictions were also tailored to the media using workplace humour, e.g. ‘it looks like Federer won’t be coming in tomorrow’, increasing relevance.

Results Product purchase cycles are generally between six and 18 months, therefore we have projected sales based on historical conversion rates. Our $7.2m projected revenue figure represents an ROI of £27 for every £1 spent. This projection comprises a total campaign cost of £159,591 and an average deal value of $180,000 or approximately 40 product sales. Brand recall was 27% higher than the next nearest brand advertised in the medium. The call to action ‘Search: IBM tennis’ contributed to a 9.7% search cost per click-through (CTR), 67% higher than the previous year, with a third of the spend.

Team Emma de la Fosse, Charlie Wilson, Pavlos Themistocleous, Andy Davis, Matt Vickers, Nina Mynk, Mark Sweatman.