Assegais 2014: A winning combination of Science and Art

One of the big winners on the night was Lesoba Difference which won a number of awards, including three golds and the SAPO Nkosi Award for its Direct Mail: Addressed Campaigns: Nedbank Brighter Tomorrow Personal Loans Campaign.

Working together

Michelle Perrow, Strategic Director, Lesoba Difference, says the agency is very excited about winning. "Different years yield different kinds of results depending on where your focus has been in a year. For us this has been a really great year, with much focus on direct mail."

She believes the award is a culmination of the combination of Nedbank's strategic direction, the great data analytics team and the creative agency brought to the campaign. "It was this cohesion that led to us winning the Nkosi Award. Great Direct Marketing (DM) comes from the combination of science and art so it is especially gratifying that we won in a traditional direct marketing space."

The campaign results speak for themselves: with spend on the campaign being R1.75m, which generated a return of R3.40m, a ROI of more than 299%.

Brands and clients are significantly more educated and savvy and therefore are putting more pressure on agencies to deliver meaningful campaigns such as this says Warren Moss, Vice Chairman of the DMASA (and CEO, Demographica) who was responsible for Awards for the Association. "Gone are the days where agencies spend X and hope for result Y. The Assegai Awards are, therefore, so much more significant because they celebrate campaigns that have delivered exceptional returns - not just clicks or views."

International standards

This year saw a complete revamp of the Awards process, bringing the process in line with international standards. "Previously these processes were floored. Now the entry, judging, scoring and measuring of the Awards are aligned to global best practice. The result was a record number of entries, with over 400 entries," explains Moss.

The weighting system for the Assegai Awards sees creative and strategic each given 30% and ROI 40%, which is in keeping with its focus on campaigns delivering real results.

"Broadly speaking the winning entries who were awarded gold Assegais, scored high in all three categories. This shows what should be obvious, but often is not; that all three areas are important," he stresses.

Katherine Madley, Executive: Group Strategy and Innovation, Group & Technology Services, Alexander Forbes was one of the 70 judges that judged the entries this year. No stranger to the Awards, she has judged them several times over the years. However, this year, she says, she saw a marked improvement in the quality of work.

Recipe for success

"Direct marketing channels have traditionally been positioned as strong brand bonding agents which have a call to action to buy. The simple recipe for excellent marketing, in any of the media and category platforms we use is 1. Strategy, 2. Creativity, 3. Delivery, and 4. Measurability."

Each step needs to be complete and excellent before you can move to the next one. She emphasises that the excellence in the first step is directly proportional to the impact of the next steps. "The difficulty with direct marketing is that we tend to zone in on the metrics required on the fourth step first, the measurability reaching the demands of the ROI number. And therein lies the problem. The tail begins to wag the dog and the creativity can get watered down. As important as targets are, they can stifle your thinking. Rather understand what winning means. Remember it is a goose that lays the golden eggs."

For her the work that stood out the most had a higher purpose than short term sales and it shone through and naturally reached the desired metric anyway. "What was lacking - apart from sometimes mixing up the steps, I find that we have lost our way a bit in excellent copywriting. I find excellent wordsmiths a rarity and the use of original expression somewhat missing. The buzzwords get totally overcooked, like epic hey."

OgilvyOne Worldwide is one of the sponsors of the event. Shelley Waterhouse, Managing Partner, of OgilvyOne Worldwide says sponsoring the Assegai Awards is an opportunity to make a statement about OgilvyOne's commitment to excellence in Integrated Marketing. "The Assegais celebrate exceptional work in a very competitive industry, and we're very proud to sponsor this event and be able to appreciate and applaud all the great work from all participants and competitors."