The Sourcing Team supported the bpma during June creating a campaign to promote the members and share some exciting examples of work. The campaign included a DM piece as a pop up mailer which was mailed prior to the IPM Awards in June and a table gift which was a pack of cards sharing great campaigns and linking to the new pinterest sight. To continue the theme from the two recent campaigns, the bpma events team used the design of “What are the odds?” for their stand design at Marketing Week Live.
Within the bpma pavilion was a seminar room – which certainly created a buzz and had excellent attendance with various guest speakers over the two days. Including the Digital v Traditional Marketing – which works best? You, the audience decide!
The panellists for the digital vs traditional debate included; James Pais – Managing Partner – FABRIKA – I have worked with James for many, many years, he has 28 years of advertising industry expertise developing his career at some of the biggest agencies working on lots of very exciting brands including DHL, Cadburys, Mercedes Benz. Chris Hyland – Director & Co-Founder of 4Ps Marketing – along with James were fighting the Digital corner. Nick Adams – Managing Director – Sense – with core expertise in experiential marketing shared his experience on the on more integrated approach with me and Andy Thorne – Outstanding Branding defending the traditional corner and the use of promotional products within it!
Us in the Traditional team were able to demonstrate some excellent stats over the two days – demonstrating return on investment and engagement offline. Through my work at The Sourcing Team and also within the presentation material I have presented to the IPM Diploma students over the years, sharing some great ROI from traditional marketing campaigns using promotional products. Including PG Tips Monkey Campaign – driving loyalty with an amazing 285% uplift in sales over 2 weeks. Clarks in store campaign, increasing trial and through the use of promotional products delivered increased sales of women’s footwear by 264% and men’s footwear by 456%.
All parties agreed that actually digital and traditional work extremely well together, and it is no longer about one vs the other. The key is finding the right solution be it digital, traditional or a combination depending on the target market, budgets and objectives of the campaign.
Direct mail had some good arguments for and against in the traditional arena! James talked about the Royal Mail seeing a rise in quality targeted direct mail – perhaps as a backlash to the reversal of junk mail landing on your doormat. We have produced some wonderful DM campaigns for our clients and in our experience – lower volumes – very targeted – clever messaging DM campaigns, whilst this can be costly, do deliver huge results particularly if you measure the customer lifecycle.
Clearly, we are all together on the fact that digital and traditional work best together – at end of each session the chair of the meeting asked the audience to decide – by holding up cards “Digital” – “Traditional” – or “Both” – unsurprisingly “Both”, seconded by traditional. As ever, it was a pleasure to support our trade association with both the IPM Awards campaign and with the seminar program.