2011 Best brand building campaign

Client Virgin Media

What is wonderful about this work? Whether you have 10Mb or 50Mb, fast broadband is just fast broadband until you demonstrate the tangible benefits. Speedy Gonzalez garnered three times as many customers for our top level XXL Broadband and Sales of Virgin Broadband increased 14% year on year.

2011 Best launch campaign

Client Virgin Media

What is wonderful about this work? A simple dramatisation of the benefits of TiVo, through DM, print, outdoor, TV, online and PR. In four weeks we increased average monthly sales by 119%, drove 15% of retail footfall and 377,178 website visits, with 89% ‘thumbs-ups’.

8 December 2011

Volkswagen is the latest company to commit to using semantic search tools that help deliver better search results on its website and better search engine optimisation.

The automaker worked with digital agency Tribal DDB to launch an intelligent search functionality that makes information easier to find, increases the relevance of search results and ensures that the content is easier to reuse. This replaces the established keyword search functionality used by most search engines.

This was achieved thanks to a tagging structure that creates relationships between information and puts contextual tags around data. This helps make search results more reliable because they are delivered according to relevancy and direct relation to comparable data instead of popularity.

The new search also allows new search terms to be easily added without having to manually retag content. It also allows content to be repurposed across the site in different contexts, meaning that a developer no longer needs to write new publishing code every time Volkswagen wants to share information with a third party.

In order to create the new search functionality, Tribal DDB had to create a detailed list of search tags, known as ontologies, to describe cars online. These were devised with semantic search expert Professor Martin Hepp, who has previously worked with Google. VW is making the ontological system they devised available for other automotive manufacturers to adopt and adapt for their own sites.

The technology -- provided by GoodRelations -- not only improves the search on the site, but also makes the site's content much more readable by search engines. Google, Yahoo and Bing all support Good Relations, meaning that sites that structure their databases using their linked ontologies will rank higher than they would have done before.

US retailer Best Buy implemented a similar strategy two years ago and found that the ranking of pages that incorporated GoodRelations rose in Google. The retailer also saw a 30 percent increase in traffic to the pages.

Semantic search has a big seal of approval from Tim Berners-Lee who recommends that the UK government uses it for the data.gov.uk website. The US government has also fully adopted its use on its data portal.

John Streit, head of technology at Tribal DDB, commented: "These ontologies allow search engines to understand the relationships between terms rather than relying on antiquated 'key word' searches. We've effectively built a spider's web of references to relevant content which delivers an intelligent search. Contextual search gives Volkswagen a standardised interface of data and content: it separates the information and application, making it easy for our services and third parties to use Volkswagen data to provide relevant information to our customers."

There are two key advantages to using semantic search technology. The first is that it gives you a single place to access data. Streit explains: "Applications often need to retrieve data from multiple sources which adds complexity and development time. By using this technology we can get everything we need from a single place which drastically lowers development time and running costs." Furthermore the exposure of data improves search and means that it can be repurposed in new and imaginative ways.

You can read up on Volkswagen's ontologies here.

7 December 2011

Volkswagen (VW) is rolling out its biggest UK social-media campaign to date to promote the 35^th anniversary of its ‘hothatch’ Golf GTI.

The online experiential activity, created by DDB UK, will centre on a series of viral videos to be hosted on VW UK’s Facebook page.

In the films, the Golf GTI acts as a ‘time machine’, seen throughout the past 35 years at events such as the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977 and the solar eclipse in 1999. The activity, which breaks this week, will roll out over the next four weeks, each clip focusing on a different occasion since the GTI’s 1967 launch.

VW launched the campaign last month with a live event staged at Truman Brewery in East London. At the blogger event, hosted by racing driver and motoring journalist Amanda Stretton, spectators saw two engineers enter the GTI ‘time machine’ and travel back to VW’s German headquarters in Wolfsburg in 1976.

Nigel Brotherton, national communications manager at VW, said the aim was to capitalise on the long –term awareness of the Model. ‘GTI, and Golf in general, is different to competitors [that have launched newly titled models], in that it has evolved,’ he said ‘this makes it so easy to trace the heritage.’

According to Brotherton the lack of above-the-line promotion is an experiment. The brand is keen to see what value the strategy will provide compared with traditional media.

‘This is a leap into the unknown for us’ he admitted. ‘What is the targeting like? How many visitors will be from the UK? The original brief was to “Make GTI famous”, and we’ve taken a calculated risk to see whether we can get that engagement and dwell time.’

VW’s last two ad campaigns have promoted its Gold Cabriolet model, and its BlueMotion energy-efficiency programme. The former sought to evoke childhood memories of open-top toy cars, with the soundtrack Days by The Kinks.

Bestselling new cars, year to date

Source: SMMT

8 November 2011