Voted by The Judging Panel Sponsored by Strategic Risk.
"It's rare that the directory medium wins any awards, although it's probably the most important in generating business. Winning the Advertising Campaign of the Year award is a real bonus and recognises the value of a much underestimated medium," said Swinton's marketing director Andrew Jackson.
The campaign of devising branded fillers for Yellow Pages added a new dimension to a business that already dominated this medium. The fillers were put up for tender last spring and proved to be of immense value in a crowded environment, where many perceive saturation has been reached.
Jackson added: "The campaign was innovative as we spent a long and sustained effort to persuade and cajole the media owner into realising its own inventory potential. Having created the opportunity Swinton had to win the tender, imaginatively interpret the tender rules, and deliver a creative solution that enabled the strategy to be perfectly executed."
Highly commended
More Th>n
We are delighted to have been highly commended for the Advertising Campaign of the Year award. "It's tremendous to receive the recognition that goes with this award," said More Th>n marketing director Mike Tildesley.
The direct insurance market is dominated by six major players and More Th>n has considerably less advertising spend than them. The general lack of product differentiation means that price is often the only discriminating factor. However, More Th>n believes it has truly unique product features, which should form the main focus of any advertising campaign.
Our overall challenge was to deliver higher stand-out on a lower advertising budget than our competitors and provide more product specific information than our existing generic brand campaign.
Our results in terms of awareness, increased sales and customer retention completely justified our bold strategy decision and being highly commended for this award is yet another measure of More Th>n's success.
InsureandGo
We are delighted to have been highly commended in this category. With increasing numbers of competitors moving into the travel insurance market, InsureandGo recognised that its advertising campaign for 2004 had to make it stand out from the crowd and ensure ease of brand recognition.
The focus of the creative became InsureandGo itself, its name and its prices, while the travel agent rip off theme was used as a secondary message.
For its outdoor and classified media, a clear and simple concept promoted InsureandGo and travel insurance as synonymous with one another.
On the internet, an effective site optimisation and active cpc programme has seen the company achieve a 50/50 split in sales online and on the phone month after month.
But to enable InsureandGo to achieve greater brand awareness on a national scale, the company chose broadcast and directory advertising - one of the first in the sector to do so.
A focused DRTV and regional radio campaign have given InsureandGo a big brand feel for a surprisingly modest budget. While directories are working hard achieving excellent cost/call results.
And to date, results overall show that 2004 will be another highly successful year for InsureandGo.
