2012 Bronze Best media strategy

Client Royal Mail

How did the campaign make a difference? A creative, real-time media strategy allowed people to see Olympic stamp adverts within hours of each medal being won, meaning that Royal Mail was with people throughout their Olympic day and at the heart of the celebrations sweeping the nation.

What details of the strategy make this a winning entry? As the official stamps supplier of the London 2012 Olympics, Royal Mail saw an opportunity to make stamps relevant again and combat consumers’ preference for email, text and social media by celebrating each gold medal won by Team GB. For each win, celebratory stamps were available by the following lunchtime. With a record and unexpected 29 gold medals in 17 days, this became quite a challenge. Media support had to be fast and flexible. A simple media idea, ‘Be Part of The Daily Olympic Conversation’, meant blending messaging into people's personal Olympic media experiences as close to real-time as physically possible. The unique real-time process established with Beta to update creative content and place it in media platforms within moments was crucial to success.

How did creativity bring the strategy to life? The creativity lay in the real time nature of the media strategy. A newsroom mentality, with staff on duty virtually 24 hours and tireless collaboration within a fully integrated team of product, PR, advertising, media and digital experts, ensured the message got through as closely as possible to every gold. Over breakfast, newspaper ads ran alongside the previous day's gold medal stories. Radio advertorials ran on talkSport within an hour of the latest win. They captured the public's mood so successfully that producers ran them during breakfast and evening drive-times for free! Digital cross-track projections alerted London Underground commuters of the latest golds within the hour. Within minutes of a Team GB gold, optimised dynamic messaging ran across popular news and sports websites. Dynamic Facebook ads even targeted eBay bidders for Olympic memorabilia!

Results Of course there had been specific sales targets, which were exceeded by 45%, but the purpose of this campaign was to make stamps relevant and exciting again. Royal Mail has sold Gold Medal Winner stamps worth millions of pounds, but it’s the number of new people who have engaged with Royal Mail that represents the real success. Around 90% of sales were to non-existing stamp collectors.

Team Tony Mattson, Ben Reilly, Natasha Lenton, Nick Heales, Emily Smith, Marika Karouzou

Other contributors Beta – Creative execution, Rapport – Outdoor specialists