2018 Silver Best data strategy

Agency: MullenLowe Profero and The Romans

Client: Gordon's - Diageo

Campaign name: #YayDelay

Campaign overview

Getting gin on the mind

The brief

Gordon’s is the world’s favourite gin – but not always the natural choice for a fi rst drink of the evening.

The challenge was to get Gordon’s on to more people’s lips, build awareness, reassert its relevance, and drive penetration.

Strategy

Gordon’s want us to enjoy a life of zest and has long been the nation’s favourite gin – but they needed to reassert their distinctive ‘Shall We?’ character.

How could they celebrate opportunity when ‘zest’ is otherwise at a low?

Train delays and cancellations are one of urban life’s biggest stresses. Every year thousands of hours ebb away, lost on the nation’s railway station platforms.

This ‘dead time’ provided a uniquely relevant opportunity to connect with potential consumers in a powerful way: through their mobile phones.

By matching real-time train delay data with phone-based geolocation, social sentiment analysis and rail operator search terms, the work targeted commuters stuck on specific station platforms with a Gordon’s offer.

This blended data turned commuters’ rush hour frustration in to happy hour refreshment – and train delays in
to #YayDelays.

Creativity

#YayDelay combined data sources, a custom-built algorithm and mobile phones to deliver a voucher for a free G&T to frustrated commuters.

The open-source National Rail API delivered live data, pinpointing delays and cancellations.

By combining this data with social media sentiment, station name, rail network operator, routes, delay length and emotional expressions, a fully formed picture was built.

Affected commuters were served geotargeted content to their phones to let them know about a discounted G&T when frustration reached a highpoint, and prompted them to help by tweeting #YayDelay.

All data harvested was displayed on a Yaydelay.com mobile site, updated in real-time, and a custom-developed algorithm evaluated the tonality of the aggregated content.

As delays mounted, and the frustration dial ticked up, vouchers were delivered to mobiles and those thousands of lost minutes were all transformed into welcome ‘Shall We?’ moments.

Results

In the pilot stage alone 10,700 people engaged with the campaign, and 16% of all visitors to the mobile site during the live period claimed a free or discounted gin and tonic.

#YayDelay achieved an incidence of 7.4 million on Diageo’s proprietary Visibility metric – showing how many times people are likely to have seen the content.

Of this 7.4 million, 62% of the views are for earned visibility. This is four times higher than the Gordon’s campaign norm.

In addition to visibility, the campaign also delivered a potential online readership of 1.52 billion.

Enthusiasm for the activity also spread outside of Waterloo as requests came in globally for #YayDelay to be rolled out.

And this is the type of activation that delivers even more strongly over time and as familiarity and anticipation build.

Team

MullenLowe Profero - Lucy Coombs, Account Director - Rowan Kisby, Strategy Director - Rachel Wells, Head of Design - Bradley Nicholls, Designer - Ben Knight, ECD - Jared Botha, Business Director