Virgin Experience Days has launched its 2016 marketing Christmas campaign, with an animated film which aims to remind people of the everlasting magic of memories.

Set to the track ‘Adventurers’, by singer/songwriter, Holley Maher, the film features a young couple exchanging Christmas gifts.  The man is puzzled when he receives an empty photograph frame – but then realises his present also includes a Virgin Experience Day gift pack.  A short animation then zooms in on some of the couple’s adventures together, memories now framed on the mantelpiece and never forgotten.

The advert, featuring the strapline ‘What memories will you create this Christmas?’ launched on the online retailer’s web site last week and will feature in a digital, social and YouTube campaign including the hashtag #ChristmasToRemember.

The campaign builds on the current UK lifestyle trend towards ‘doing stuff not buying stuff’, after Virgin Experience Days saw a pickup in demand for experience gifts as the UK turns its back on material things.

The same basic creative approach will be used across both Virgin Experience Days’ consumer-facing communications and its business-to-business operations.

Tim Watkins, Virgin Experience Days Director of Sales & Partnerships, says: “The Christmas campaign highlights experiences as the new riches.  As a nation, we’ve reached ‘peak stuff’ and consumer priorities are changing from ‘buying stuff’ to ‘doing things’ as we spend more on holidays, entertainment and eating out to service a lifestyle. Naturally, this trend is reflected in our corporate sales activity, with customers and employees increasingly choosing experiences over gift cards for material goods. Forward thinking businesses have identified this trend and we’ve seen a marked increase in incentive programmes focusing on experience benefits and rewards.“

The animation, developed in-house by Virgin Experience Days Lead Designer, Craig Francies, has been created using Modo. It can be viewed at https://www.virginexperiencedays.co.uk/christmastoremember and on the Virgin Experience Days YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-hq7Asvv00

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Loyalty and promotional travel expert Inspire has recruited Geanette Howard as a Business Development Manager, taking its headcount to 110.

Howard has 15 years’ experience in the voucher and rewards industry, having started her career at Whitbread before progressing to Boots and, most recently, SVM Global.

Keith Herman, managing director of Inspire, says: “Geanette’s appointment demonstrates our passion for providing companies with benefits and incentives that will make a true difference to their business. Having worked with such a wide variety of businesses, her experience is unrivalled and I’ve no doubt that she’ll be instrumental in our growth as we continue to not only meet our customers’ needs, but also exceed their expectations.”

Howard will focus on expanding the client base of Inspire, which now has operations in over 20 countries, through the provision of its flagship product, The Inspire Travel Card. Launched in 2005, the Inspire Travel Card works as a physical or digital gift card which can be preloaded to any amount for recipients to use when booking travel through Inspire’s dedicated ABTA, IATA and ATOL licensed agency.

In 2015, Inspire saw its turnover increase by 15% to £17.7 million, thanks to a number of successful campaigns with Nivea, Samsung and MasterCard. This year, the company is on track to achieve £20 million in revenue and has invested over £100,000 to revamp its services in order to offer a more streamlined customer journey and efficient usability.

The firm has also created the Inspire Travel Card for Charities and has been working for three years with Family Fund, a charity that provides grants for families raising disabled or seriously ill young people to take much-needed family breaks.

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Household appliances company Bosch is running a promotion offering a free TomTom Spark GPS fitness watch, worth £149.99, when they purchase a Bosch Athlet vacuum cleaner.

The TomTom Spark GPS fitness watch can accurately monitor physical activity, performance and heart rate and is also an MP3 music player, so consumers can listen to their favourite tracks while cleaning the house.

The campaign was put together for Bosch by London-based promotional agency, TLC Marketing UK.

Rebecca Ness, Trade Marketing Manager at Bosch, says: “This is a great example of how we make consumers lives easier and turn everyday tasks into pleasant and fun experiences while simultaneously tapping into current health trends.”

Martin Covill, Business Director at TLC Marketing, adds: “The Bosch Athlet TomTom Spark promotion is an innovative way to attract Bosch customers. Brands are starting to take advantage of the current digital health trend and so we wanted to reward Bosch customers with a high-quality gift they can use any time, for any activity. As the Athlet is cordless, the TomTom Spark will accurately track your performance while doing the vacuuming, making housework that little more rewarding.”

The campaign will be communicated through POS and runs until the end of October 2016.

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Nick Deyong, Founder and CEO at The NDL Group, explains how to make the most of your prize promotion strategy. PROMOTIONAL FEATURE

With clients often seeking to fulfil objectives such as brand engagement and customer loyalty, finding the right promotional prize incentive, one that connects with the target audience, can be key to achieving your campaign objectives.

Delivered well, prize promotions really can provide a good return.  Promotional activity has been proven for many years to help change long-established shopping habits and drive attention to one particular brand over a competitor.  A carefully crafted promotion, seen at the moment of an actual buying decision, can be a very powerful way to interrupt an automated buying pattern.

The biggest challenge at the start is usually to ensure there’s a really clear commercial objective. What do you want this promotion to achieve for your brand?  Boost sales? Drive engagement? Captivating a target audience can be tough if the promotion is trying to cover off multiple goals.

Once you’ve got your ‘big idea’, delivering both the prize content and the mechanic as a slick end-to-end customer experience can prove tricky. We achieve this with Promotigo™, our proprietary technology that provides a user-friendly platform, while running complex technology, such as entry validation, behind the scenes.

Insight drives creativity

Obviously, we also use customer insight to drive the creative process.  If you can tap into the emotion behind a purchasing decision, you can really achieve a targeted campaign.  Linking your brand to a relevant theme or product that makes your customers feel good is a fantastic way to get them engaged.

We’ve done this recently with Thirst Pockets, Intertissue’s brand of kitchen towels.  By associating the brand with everyday essentials at the heart of the home, we link to the positive feelings of family-time, comfort and security.  A promotion which helps the consumer make this connection, in a split second, can be very powerful indeed.

Another element that has to be taken into account is measurement. What constitutes success for your promotion? Setting the objective in the first instance will help you set KPIs to measure the impact of your promotion.

With digital campaigns, for example, we can very quickly report back on traffic to our platform, such as numbers of competition entries or cashback claims validated.  Most of our clients are keen to monitor their promotions daily through our real-time reporting dashboard.

Further reporting can also be put in place to measure a promotion’s wider impact for the brand, such as a rise in the volume and reach of user generated content on social media, or an increase in newsletter sign-ups or even additional media coverage generated in the audience’s target titles.

OK, you have your objectives and your big creative idea. You have worked out the mechanics which will deliver to the target audience via the most appropriate and cost-effective channels and how you are going to measure success.

Before you go any further, however, you have to take into account potential regulatory or legal challenges. It’s essential that a brand complies with relevant laws and regulations. Most of our clients are experienced in running great promotions, but they don’t necessarily have the in-house resource or expertise required to make it all happen. It’s essential that any promotion is checked by qualified legal experts.

Cross border blues

Cross-border promotions can be particularly fraught with complexity, with legal and compliance issues presenting a multitude of challenges.  The UK enjoys possibly the least regulation, and Europe or the US are relatively straight-forward too, as long you have the right contacts in the various countries you plan to run the promotion in to make sure you have stuck to local laws and regulations.

Roll out a promotion further afield, however, and you’ve got to be very wary.  Asia, Australia, Latin America and Africa have widely differing laws and regulations to the UK, Europe and America and also to each other.

It’s not impossible to run a truly global campaign, but there are always going to be compromises that have to be made in order to comply with local laws.

The trick is to ensure the campaign concept is creative yet flexible, otherwise the legal costs can outweigh the benefits of the promotion. With the right contacts, a multi-territory model can usually be agreed, but it takes a certain level of legal expertise to even start the conversation!

Making people happy

Finally, don’t forget that there is even more work to be done once the promotion has finished – you have to manage the delivery of the prizes.

Dealing with happy winners is a perk of the job for us, especially when they’re delighted with their once-in-a-lifetime trip!  But managing a brand’s winners takes incredible attention to detail. It is vital to ensure their experience really is one of the highlights of their life, so that they become an important brand advocate for the long-term.  It’s fun, but there’s an unbelievable amount of work that goes on behind the scenes.

Also, for brands to get the most of out their promotional budgets, they need to leverage the prize winner experience, which these days can be very effectively done via social media.

Give your prize winners a fabulous experience and they should be more than happy to spread the message by sharing the highlights on social media. This can  be hugely powerful, although obviously it has to genuinely come from them, which means you have to deliver a really great experience. Getting prize winners to endorse and advocate a brand can increase the reach of your campaign ten-fold.

You can also encourage winners (and entrants) to submit and share their own User Generated Content (UGC), although you must always be careful to stick within the regulations and laws which apply in the territories the promotion is running in.

About NDL

The NDL Group was founded in 1997 by Nick Deyong, with heritage in radio promotions. Now a multiple award-winning group based in North London, NDL offers a complete, end-to-end brand promotion service to media owners, blue-chip brands and their agencies. Specific teams offer a range of expertise including campaign planning, building bespoke promotional platforms, fulfilling all aspects of prizes, experiences and rewards, and total winner management. For more information please visit ndlgroup.com or call 0207 428 1214. PROMOTIONAL FEATURE

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Confused.com has added two new free toys, Miss Herbert and Stunt Herbert, to the rewards which customers can claim when they take out selected products through the price comparison site.
To support the launch of the two Herbert toys, Confused.com have unveiled a new 30” advertisement, in which Stunt Herbert and Miss Herbert’s sibling rivalry is revealed as they compete.
In addition to the ad, the Herberts are proudly sponsoring the second series of ITV’s popular show Ninja Warrior UK. The show starts in January and features contestants trying to battle their way through one of the world’s toughest obstacle courses in the hope of being crowned the ultimate Ninja Warrior.
Confused.com says it decided to expand its collectable family of toys and give customers more opportunities to claim them after the success of its free BRIAN the Robot toy, which launched in February 2015.
From now on, customers who take out car, home, life, van, motorbike or pet insurance or a credit card through Confused.com can choose between one of the three collectable toys: BRIAN, Miss Herbert and Stunt Herbert.
The toys have been developed in partnership with promotional marketing agency ATOM Marketing.
The Herberts were first seen coming to the aid of BRIAN when he was captured by metal scrapyard dealers last Christmas and have been by BRIAN’s side ever since. And due to popular demand Confused.com have now launched two new toys, Miss Herbert and Stunt Herbert.
The new pull-and-go toys are designed to encapsulate the characters’ personalities. Miss Herbert is sweet, sparkly and as hard as nails. Her toy comes with a set of stickers and an activity wheel that helps you decide what games to play with her. Stunt Herbert is the hardest, most daring and most reckless of the Herberts, and his bobble-headed toy comes with a fun target game.
The Ninja Warrior UK sponsorship is being marked with a series of different idents starring Miss Herbert and Stunt Herbert as their sibling rivalry boils over. These idents range from five to 15 seconds in length and feature Miss and Stunt attempting to outdo each other as they try to capture the audience’s attention.
To further support the toy launch, Confused.com are focusing on social media in a new fully-integrated advertising campaign. Consumers will be able to get involved and pick a team: Team Miss, Team Stunt or Team BRIAN via Confused.com’s social channels.
Fiona Creedon, Head of Advertising at Confused.com, says: “Since the launch of our BRIAN the robot toy we’ve seen his popularity soar and felt it was time to expand his family. The Herberts were introduced last Christmas and since then we’ve seen people’s affections grow for these loveable robots.”
Confused.com, launched in 2002, was the UK’s first price comparison site for car insurance. It has expanded its range of comparison products over the last couple of years to include home insurance, holiday insurance, pet insurance, small van insurance, motorcycle insurance, breakdown cover and gas and electricity, as well as financial services products including credit cards, loans, mortgages and life insurance. Confused.com is owned by the Admiral Group plc.
ATOM Marketing is a promotional marketing agency specialising in creating and managing campaigns for some of the UK and Europe’s biggest brands.

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