It’s the end of the year, and I’m a big fan of making lists (I always do my top ten albums of the year without fail), so I thought put together a short list of my favourite All-Channel campaigns from the past 12 months.

Not in any particular order (although obviously all of the Launch campaigns would be top of the list if we were ranking them). And also, even though my own specialism is digital, this is not a list of ten digital campaigns. However, most of them do have a strong digital element (but of course)

Here we go:

Betty Crocker – Whoopie Moments

You can read more about our All-Channel Betty Crocker campaign in the case study here, but to give you an executive summary: we built a bespoke Facebook app on the Betty Crocker UK page for fans to ‘share’ or ‘give’ whoopie moments (little bite size moments of joy) in celebration of Whoopie Pies launching in the UK. 12,000 new fans and 750 competition entries later, we’d spread joy around the UK (and Ireland) and made a considerable splash for Betty Crocker.

Heinz Get Well Soup

OK, so I did say this wasn’t a list of ten digital campaigns. However, I reserve the right to put digital campaigns in here. And I absolutely loved the simple genius of We Are Social’s Heinz Get Well Soup campaign. Launched at the beginning of cold and flu season, users could go onto the Heinz Soup Facebook page (using a specially designed app) and send sick friends a personalised can of Heinz soup. That’s it. A sentiment perfectly in keeping with the brand’s identity, and real ROI for Heinz (they obviously charged for the service). Very clever.

The Vaccines – User generated Instagram music video

Another campaign that I have blogged about before (complain if you like, but it’s my list) but it really was an inspired piece of theory and execution. The Vaccines partnered with Instagram and encouraged fans and photo-enthusiasts to upload their summer festival pics to a bespoke microsite. From the resulting images, a music video was cut together showcasing the best of the work. Great user generated content, viewed by (as of December 2011) one million people, saving Sony Music cash (real ROI) in the process. Genius.

Virgin Holidays – Winter Swimwear Queue

Launch were approached by Virgin Holidays to generate mass awareness for their January sale, so we put together a big, quick-to-execute All-Channel campaign that secured coverage in the Metro, Daily Mirror, Evening Standard, The Times and The Daily Star. We took the idea of a ‘summer holiday’ in December as our motif, and held the world’s largest ever swimwear queue outside Virgin Holidays brand new swimwear emporium on High Street Kensington. It’s a great example of our all-channel approach, bringing together experiential and social media that results in fantastic media coverage.

Jay-Z – Decoded

At Launch, we’re well-schooled when it comes to combining experiential and digital, so it made us all warm ‘n’ fuzzy to see an outdoor + digital campaign rewarded at this year’s Cannes Lions awards. For the launch of Jay-Z’s autobiography, ‘Decoded’, agency Droga5 put every page of the book in a real world location. The digital element of the campaign came through a Bing Maps-enabled scavenger hunt, allowing the audience to uncover clues and locate pages.

A big idea, a truckload of ambition (exactly what you’d expect from Jay-Z) and big client demands all resulted in a truly innovative and memorable campaign.

Capital One – Credit Made Clearer

If you mention credit cards to people, they’ll probably talk about their latest purchases, or how they have a mountain of debt to pay off. They probably won’t know their current APR or what travel insurance cover they have as standard. That was the challenge Launch faced when Capital One asked us to help build consumer awareness of their Credit Made Clearer initiative. So we put together an All-Channel campaign that mixed handing out information to people in airport departure lounges, organising competitions and a blogger panel with a range of family, parenting and personal finance influencers, alongside three media relations stories that looked at lack of awareness around the detail of credit cards. The results? 18 pieces of national coverage, 502 pieces of coverage overall, and credit card awareness in the front of the paper, instead of the back.

Red Bull Street Art View

Something of a theme here, with campaigns using maps APIs to create great content. Red Bull’s collaboration with Google Street View is another example of simple ideas always being the best. Red Bull used its clout to compile a database of the best street art from around the globe, then created a simple web portal that uses Google’s Street View technology and allows you to view the art in situ. It’s almost like being there.

National Australia Bank – the public breakup

Looking a little further afield, this campaign from Australia caught my eye. The National Australia Bank, to try and dissociate itself from the other major Aussie banks, publicly broke up with them on Valentine’s Day. This simple idea was moulded and adapted into an All-Channel approach – 60 couples broke up in public places, creating news stories and video content. The campaign also extended to press, outdoor, radio, mobile billboards, street teams, street chalking, and helicopter banners. The effort also ambushed execs from the other banks in their offices and elsewhere. Bold, typically Australian, but undoubtedly effective.

The NatWest Secret Cricketer

Sometimes, marketing campaigns simply make you smile. This is exactly what NatWest’s Secret Cricketer videos did for me. The bank signed up former England cricket captain Michael Vaughan, and persuaded him to dress up as an old man, and turn out for officially the worst cricket team in the UK. Their opponents needed to be none the wiser, and so he strode out into the middle and unleashed his signature cover drive. I would suggest you watch the video to find out what happened next.

The Banker – Top 1000 World Banks

Heard of The Banker? It’s an FT-owned publication, and as such, is subject to media compete issues when it comes to securing coverage. Launch ripped up that issue this year when creating awareness around The Banker’s annual ‘Top 1000 World Banks’ industry rankings. Using a mixture of briefings, news hijacking and good old fashioned news hooks, we secured 22 pieces of national / international coverage, as well as nine pieces of broadcast – across BBC, CNBC and Sky News. Highly targeted, highly talkable and hugely impressive. Even if we do say so ourselves.

An Introduction to PPC

As marketing strategies continue to evolve and adapt to the online shift, understanding and utilising the new tools at your disposal in the correct way is critical to effective All-Channel campaigns. So with that in mind, just what is PPC advertising? How does it work? And why should I care? Sit back, grab a tea, and I’ll tell you…

So, PPC, heard of it? Any guesses? A quick office poll produced ‘Please Prepare Canapes’, ‘Post Party Crying’ or, my particular favourite, ‘People Prefer Cats’.  Amusing though these suggestions may be, the answer is, of course, a little more conventional. For the uninitiated PPC stands for Pay Per Click advertising.

What is it?

First off the basics, when you search for something on Google it will give you two different types of results: natural listings and sponsored links. Natural listings are free, generated by Google’s algorithms and are dependent on SEO (an acronym for another time and another cup of tea). What we are interested in today are the sponsored links. These are paid for results which appear at the top in the orange box.

Google’s PPC advertising is in essence a real-time auction in which you bid on keywords that you would like your ad to appear beside when searched. You only pay when somebody clicks on your link and thus you pay per click, ergo PPC! Simple!

The order that these results appear (the ranking) will be dependent on the popularity of your search term. The more popular a search term is the more companies there will be competing over it. Those with the highest bid and those with adverts whose copy is most relevant to the search term will appear at the top of the list.

What does it achieve?

What are the benefits to your brand? Simply put – visibility. The ads will generate traffic to your website, targeted leads and instant sales. The beauty of PPC though is its flexibility. You can adjust your budget as you see fit in a system which really does give back relative to what you put in. You can test keywords and track your conversions to keep an iron grip on exactly where your advertising budgets are going, one of the notable differences between online and traditional advertising.

As with all elements of digital marketing, using PPC on its own would leave you with a limited online strategy , however if implemented wisely as part of an All-Channel campaign PPC advertising can be invaluable, lucrative and in most cases absolutely essential.

Next week we will be covering the yin to PPC’s yang, SEO. If you have any questions or would like to find out how PPC could work for you, send us a tweet @LaunchGroup or an email to hello@launchgroup.co.uk.

The answer to the question – ‘which platforms should I be using in social media?’ – is pretty simple really. Most digital practitioners would agree (in broad terms) that it’s merely a case of identifying where conversations relevant to you are happening online, and then coming up with a way to join those conversations without intruding and causing a backlash.

Social media, at its core, is no different to other comms channels. As our CEO Johnny Pitt pointed out in his recent all-channel PR post, the key to creating a successful all-channel campaign or presence is to select the right channel to reach your target audience. This is equally true whether you are integrating social media into existing marcomms activity, or putting together a standalone digital campaign.

Additionally, having an idea of what the endgame is going to be – what success looks like – is key to using these digital channels effectively. Consider your use of social media and digital channels in marketing in a similar way to the process of writing a good story. You should know what the ending of the tale is going to be before you start.

It might be that you want to generate product sales through digital advertising, or protect your reputation through the effective monitoring of conversations online. Whatever you do, be rigorous with your measurement and evaluation, and be realistic about what you can achieve. Success doesn’t happen overnight, even if in some cases it seems that way.

That’s exactly what we believe in at Launch. Identifying the key channels-to-market and communicating a message to a specific audience. This means working with our clients collaboratively to put campaigns in place, not pushing them down a particular route to fulfil our own agendas. Setting ambitious – but realistic – targets that are going to make a tangible difference to our client’s bottom line. And above all, doing great work that is backed by brilliant thinking.

Rushing into setting up a Facebook page or building a microsite may seem like a good idea initially, but if you truly want to build a long term, successful presence in the digital world, putting time and effort into identifying the best channel and tying down your key message ise of paramount importance.

Get in touch if you’d like to discuss our all-channel approach in more detail

Social media channels

We had some exciting news at Launch towers this week, as the first details of Reputation Online’s Top 100 PR agencies made their way onto Twitter, c/o Vikki Chowney.

Launch is incredibly proud to be on the list at number 29 (you can check out a scan of the page below).

It’s a testament to the great work done by the whole team on a range of digital projects across a range of clients, including Disney, Royal British Legion and Tesco to name but a view.

As an integrated PR agency, we obviously put digital at the heart of everything we do, and encourage all of our staff to get involved in all aspects of activity.

I’d like to give a particular shout outs in recognition of their work to (in no particular order): Rachel Clark, Andy Nash, Rich Benson, Harriet Murphy, and obviously not forgetting our CEO Johnny Pitt, whose vision gives us the opportunity to work on such great projects in an innovative way.

You can pick up a copy of the full list in this week’s NMA. A microsite with details of all of the agencies featured launches next week.

We’re obviously sorry to see Reputation Online go, as well as the print version of NMA, and best wishes go out to everyone involved and affected.