Last night’s third International Performance Marketing Awards (IPMAs) at the wonderful De Vere Grand Connaught Rooms was a sell-out and it sure didn’t disappoint. With nearly 400 people eagerly watching to see who would be named winners on the night and Ed Gamble providing plenty of comedy throughout, the evening was memorable for all the right reasons.
Presented in association with advanced store and filled with food, drinks, networking and even a surprise Flashmob performance! The IPMAs celebrated the excellent performance marketing activity happening in the key regions across 26 different categories.
Here’s a breath breakdown of last nights winners. The full information is available to download in the Book of the Night.
Regional awards
USA Best Managed Affiliate Programme: Resolution Media – Resolution Media and CJ Affiliate for Swarovski
Building on the success of Swarovski’s long-lasting affiliate programme, Resolution Media and CJ Affiliate pushed through customised promotional motives to increase sales during an off-peak period. With customised tracking, ad serving and reporting technology, this concept worked wonders. It beat revenue target by 248%, surpassed ROAS by 85%, and saw the order value increase to 361% year-on-year.
USA Best Performance Marketing Campaign: RevLifter – RevLifter for HP US
HP’s US team appointed RevLifter to increase the sales of premium laptops and better target gamers and business users. Steering its award-winning RevPage solution, RevLifter met HP’s objectives through a fully branded coupon hub adept at matching customers with personalised deals. After just three weeks, RevLifter hit double-digit increases in conversion rates and average order values and became a top-ten affiliate for the brand.
APAC Best Managed Affiliate Programme: Optimise Media – Optimise Media for Samsung India
Tasked with driving traffic and conversions from the Indian market, Optimise launched e-commerce site Samsung e-Store to deliver their products online through the app and mobile website. Using its publisher base as a key channel of market insight for Samsung, Optimise delivered holistic growth and surpassed all expectations. The affiliate channel now contributes 30% of all online sales for Samsung and has seen an impressive 127% year-on-year growth.
APAC Best Performance Marketing Campaign: Rakuten Marketing – Rakuten Marketing and AMEX Korea for MATCHESFASHION.COM
Luxury fashion retailer MATCHESFASHION.COM and Rakuten Marketing executed one of the most promising performance marketing campaigns in the APAC region. By partnering with AMEX Korea, both parties drove brand awareness, reach and sales in the region, utilising brand, publisher and network capabilities. This delivered a sales uplift of 156%; generated coverage across more than 3,000 blog forums, and saw a 66% increase in average order value in South Korea.
Western Europe Best Managed Affiliate Programme: CJ Affiliate – CJ Affiliate and Debenhams
CJ Affiliate and Debenhams not only achieved the retailer’s targets in Q4 but also established a healthy affiliate programme that beat the high street odds. CJ commissioned only what was profitable while automating manual processes to execute their objectives more efficiently. Overall, both parties achieved 7% year-on-year revenue growth and reduced the cost of sales by 13% in what was indeed one of the best performance campaigns ever seen.
Western Europe Best Performance Marketing Campaign: vouchercloud vouchercloud and Awin for Currys PC World: Red Dead Redemptions
vouchercloud and Awin combined both traditional and online retail experiences to drive revenue for Currys PC World with the Red Dead Redemption 2 launch. By offering an exclusive promotion code delivered through location-specific push notifications, geo-targeting and geo-conquesting via the vouchercloud app, sales went through the roof by a staggering 414.5%. This campaign surpassed all expectations during a high-traction release period for a popular game title.
LATAM Best Performance Marketing Campaign: Awin – Awin for Carrefour: Local Expansion Through Publisher Diversity
Awin helped Carrefour increase brand awareness in a growing Brazil market and drive more website traffic and sales during a historically low sales quarter. With Awin’s strategic oversight, Carrefour launched an influencer marketing campaign that used the platforms’ advanced tracking solutions and influencer partnership opportunities. As a result, the campaign reached over 4.5 million impressions, yielding a 112% increase in revenue.
MENA Best Performance Marketing Campaign: ForwardPMX – ForwardPMX for Homecentre: Fuelling In-store Growth
ForwardPMX helped retail brand Homecentre understand what online behaviours led to in-store purchases using advanced analytics. ForwardPMX made the journey from online to offline as seamless as possible to get a true reflection of digital and in-store profits, increasing the brand’s revenue by 410% and enabling a return on ad spend of 230%.
Eastern Europe Best Performance Marketing Campaign: TradeTracker – TradeTracker for home&you: Sustainable growth
By introducing real-time attribution and new partners to an already mature CPS-based affiliate program, TradeTracker helped home&you move away from last-click attribution to a fully customised model. The established campaign beat all targets, reaching 39% year-on-year growth and 16.5 million impressions on premium placements whilst increasing influencer engagement by 179%.
Vertical awards
Best Paid Search Campaign: ForwardPMX – ForwardPMX for Uber Eats: Making Every Dollar Count
Uber Eats came to ForwardPMX with the ambition to dominate an already saturated South Korean market. With local knowledge that is second to none, strategic consumer planning processes and granular optimisation, ForwardPMX helped Uber Eats drive 600% more app downloads and 963% more first trips, enabling Uber Eats to become a strong competitor in the market.
Best Paid Social Campaign: Merkle | Periscopix – Merkle | Periscopix for The Body Shop: The Motherbot Campaign
With the Motherbot solution digitalising the customer journey experience, Merkle | Periscopix and THE BODY SHOP capitalised on intent and captivated the audience in a creative way. The Motherbot engaged consumers by helping them choose a personalised gift for someone they cared about in a quick and efficient way. Targeting customers at the optimum time meant users engaged with the brand 53% longer than expected, increasing the conversion value of offline sales by 147%.
Best Influencer Marketing Campaign: IMAgency B.V. Philips and IMAgency B.V.: Philips Hair Care Saudi Arabia
In a country known for its restrictions when it comes to showing your hair as a woman, Philips worked with IMA to amplify the launch of its Heated Straightening Brush in Saudi Arabia. Working with influencers to increase awareness online and in-store, the campaign had a total combined reach of 4.2 million and women were even going into stores asking for “the product that straightens your hair in five minutes”, proving the message recall of the campaign was a huge success.
Best Content Marketing Campaign: Awin – Awin for HP: Incentivizing Inspired Content
Awin strengthened HP’s US affiliate program by establishing content partnerships as long-term marketing campaigns that enabled creators and media houses to drive last-click revenue and demand for HP’s store using performance marketing tactics. HP added 73 new content partners to the program with results leading to 43% growth in revenue generated by the content partners in what was indeed an outstanding campaign.
Best Use of Data: The Hut Group – The Hut Group
The Hut Group noticed a gap for measuring influencer performance in-line with performance marketing channels. With this in mind, they developed the “influence-ometer” – an attribution model that forecasts influencer ROI and can be customised to work on a local level for global clients. Not only has this led to closer relationships with key partners; it’s also helped scale influencer outreach at pace.
Best Use of Programmatic: NMPi – NMPi & Liverpool FC
Building on Liverpool FC’s 2018/19 success in Q4 was no easy task, especially with purchasing habits changing before Christmas. Therefore, NMPi shifted its creative strategy to focus on the gift purchasing process. They developed interactive gift recommendation ads for customers, which increased click-through rate by 54% and conversion rate by 18%, resulting in Christmas-driven revenue soaring by 12% year-on-year.
Best Native Advertising Campaign: TradeTracker – TradeTracker for Visit Norway: Visit Norway Storytelling
By focusing on increasing the quality of visitors in international markets, Visit Norway added their offers and products natively in the stories and articles on the brand’s website to convert visitors to customers. Working closely with TradeTracker for its 2019 campaign, the content is now converting more visitors to customers by having raised the click to sales ratio by 70%.
Technology, Team and Agency Awards
Best Affiliate Network: Rakuten Marketing – Rakuten Marketing
Strategic global focus, reach, and supporting both advertisers and publishers globally are just some of the unique selling points that make Rakuten Marketing one of the most sought-after marketing platforms around. Accelerating its international footprint in France and Germany as well as consistent double-digit growth in the UK showcases the company’s hard work, resilience and innovation, making them a worthy winner of this award.
Best CPA Network – Admitad – Admitad
Bringing together thousands of brands and publishers from around the world, Admitad created a unified marketing platform for advertisers and publishers to form and expand mutually beneficial relationships. Within the last couple of years, Admitad has seen advertiser growth reach $3.4 billion in total across all GEOs and $10 million invested in CPA start-ups, making them one of the most ambitious and exciting CPA networks around.
Best SaaS Platform: Impact – Impact: Performance to Partnerships
Impact has made it possible for advertisers to manage and optimise their affiliate partners, influencer, mobile app, B2B partnerships and more, all on a single, global SaaS platform. In addition, Impact has been accelerating growth by scaling the full partnership lifecycle of discovery recruitment, onboarding, engagement and optimisation of all types of partnerships. Overall, Impact is leading the charge with its vision of overcoming the affiliate channel’s key challenges.
Best Technology: Partnerize – Partnerize Partner Automation
Partnerize has been focusing on several technologies and enhancements that have since been “revolutionised” to support the partnerships within the performance marketing space. Partnerize also manages more than $6 billion in partner sales, $500 million in partner payments every year, and delivers data-driven intelligence and industry-leading management tools that improve ROI from this fast-growing sales channel.
Best Team in Performance Marketing: Rakuten Marketing – Rakuten Marketing
Rakuten Marketing has continued to share both its expertise and experience to drive the performance marketing industry forward. The global team also continues to participate and speak at industry events while maintaining an impressive client retention rate of 95.5% and staff retention rate of 82.5%. This year, Rakuten Marketing invested heavily in technology to develop new innovative products with a focus on AI and programmatic to bring further efficiencies to the affiliate channel.
Best Agency – Acceleration Partners – Acceleration Partners
Acceleration Partners has elevated its global offering for clients across the US, EMEA, LATAM and APAC in the last 12 months. The agency’s unique view of the market has allowed them to look beyond the traditional affiliate landscape to explore new opportunities. This has led to $2.6 billion in affiliate revenue as well as a 50% increase in clients managed by global teams, making Acceleration Partners the deserved winner.
Global Industry Awards
Best Retail Campaign: Rakuten Marketing – Rakuten Marketing and AMEX Korea for MATCHESFASHION.COM
MATCHESFASHION.COM called on Rakuten Marketing to deliver one of the most innovative global performance marketing programmes in luxury fashion. With the aim to drive brand awareness, reach and sales in South Korea, they partnered with AMEX Korea to reach more than six million affluent Korean consumers. This unique collaboration delivered a sales uplift of 156% and saw a 66% increase in average order value in South Korea.
Best Technology & Telecoms Campaign: Awin – Awin and Smarter Click for Carphone Warehouse
Smarter Click, Carphone Warehouse and Awin teamed up in Q4 with to increase sales and reduce abandonment through personalisation. By providing users with a more personalised journey, they exceeded performance expectations, with multiple campaigns delivering strong results for Carphone Warehouse during a vital trading period.
Best Finance Campaign – iProspect – iProspect for Marcus by Goldman Sachs Putting the interest back into savings
iProspect and Marcus by Goldman Sachs crafted a multi-channel approach that innovatively reached the target UK audience and drove them to open a high-interest savings account. The launch campaign resulted in a 15% increase in generic searches for savings accounts by people in the UK, ultimately putting consumer’s interest back into savings.
Best Travel Campaign: Merkle | Periscopix – Merkle | Periscopix for The TEFL Academy
The TEFL Academy and Merkle | Periscopix investigated using different purchase intentions and reasoning within the creative content strategy. Due to the scale of cultural reasoning, global scale of trade, and creative content, personalising content proved tricky. Pulling together Google’s new smart technology with a bespoke ad solution, Merkle | Periscopix executed a more personalised and culturally appropriate ad strategy that exceeded all targets.
On behalf of the International Performance Marketing Awards, PerformanceIN and advanced store, a huge thank you to all the event sponsors that helped make the ceremony possible. And finally, a huge congratulations to all the esteemed and deserved winners.