Meet a Landy Award winner: Wolfgang Digital integrates search and TV into a cross-channel campaign for a big Irish retailer

Wolfgang Digital accepts the Landy Award for “Best Integration of Search into Cross-Channel Marketing.”

Retailer Littlewoods Ireland, founded in 1923, now sells its fashion, gadgets and homeware products exclusively online. The company makes almost half of its annual revenue in November and December.

Their search marketing agency, Wolfgang Digital, found that it usually takes four website visits before most visitors make a purchase. So Littlewoods asked Wolfgang Digital to create a campaign for their 2015 Christmas season built around this finding.

The result, in addition to boosting conversions by eight times more than standard campaigns in Littlewoods Irelands’ most successful Christmas campaign ever, is that Wolfgang Digital won this year’s Landy Award for Best Integration of Search into Cross-Channel Marketing.

“[Google Analytics] told us,” Wolfgang Digital CEO Alan Coleman said via email, “that it was unrealistic for us to expect people to click on a search ad, visit the website and buy.”

“So for a search ad to be effective,” he told me, “we needed to create at least three other touch points around it.”

“From other cross-channel campaigns for Wolfgang Digital clients, we’ve seen plenty of evidence that conversion rates increase as you communicate with the same user in a consistent manner across multiple channels.”

The first touch point in the Littlewoods campaign was a single TV ad, which was intended to drive viewers to the web, via a text overlay on the ad that recommended viewers “Shazam now to shop the ad.” That meant smartphone users should let the Shazam mobile app listen to the TV ad’s soundtrack. When it did, the user was brought to the campaign’s landing page on the web, which contained purchaseable product ads relating to the TV ad. Here’s a still from the TV ad:

The second touch point: online ads. The TV ad also contained Littlewoods Ireland’s Facebook and Twitter locations, which similarly contained ads relating to the TV one, displayed around the times of the TV ad’s broadcasts. Here’s a Facebook ad from the campaign:

Wolfgang expected some users to search Google for related terms when they saw the TV ad, so there were AdWords ready to be displayed for specific searches, for such terms as “toys” or “Christmas decorations.”

The campaign also utilized Google’s RLSA to target website visitors with their ads, when they searched on Google.

The landing page — the third touch point — linked to various behind-the-scenes videos about the TV ad on YouTube. Here are some of the mobile landing pages:

The fourth touch point: Visitors to the landing page or the YouTube videos were retargeted via cookies or mobile ID, so they saw related ads on other sites across the web.

Additionally, there were “interesting facts” offered to the press:

For instance, Littlewoods Ireland found that, when looking at what sold best and when, it turned out that vacuum cleaners were most popular on Tuesdays, earrings on Saturday mornings, tights on Mondays, and, at 8:23 p.m. on Thursday evenings, it’s knickers — British slang for panties. Some publications picked up those and other interesting facts. When the publications were online, the tidbits were linked to the Littlewoods website.

And there was specific, linked content added to the Littlewoods blog, such as: “How to get the Best Black Friday Deals” and “Can’t Wait for Black Friday? Littlewoods Ireland has a sale right now!”

When an online sale was made, there was a secondary retargeting campaign offering a cash voucher to buyers if they recommended a friend.

“The unique element of this campaign,” Coleman told me, “is it took multiple marketing channels both offline and online and created a seamless cross channel communication to the user as they moved from awareness, to interest, to action and beyond to loyalty and advocacy.”

“All based on the single insight that users took four visits plus to convert,” he said.

About The Author

Barry Levine

Barry Levine covers marketing technology for Third Door Media. Previously, he covered this space as a Senior Writer for VentureBeat, and he has written about these and other tech subjects for such publications as CMSWire and NewsFactor. He founded and led the web site/unit at PBS station Thirteen/WNET; worked as an online Senior Producer/writer for Viacom; created a successful interactive game, PLAY IT BY EAR: The First CD Game; founded and led an independent film showcase, CENTER SCREEN, based at Harvard and M.I.T.; and served over five years as a consultant to the M.I.T. Media Lab. You can find him at LinkedIn, and on Twitter at xBarryLevine.