Hoorah Digital rebrand: The Midas touch

Hoorah Digital team. Image supplied.

Hoorah Digital has partnered with a New York-based based tech company to overcome this problem through creative technology that enables personalisation at scale.

Creative and data

This is part of Hoorah Digital’s drive to bridge the gap between creative and data, and the agency showed its intent recently when it unveiled its rebrand.

Creative - Meet data

Irvine Partners  10 Sep 2019

“The technology, which is used by brands such as the Bank of America and eBay, allows you to produce creativity at scale faster than ever,” says Jay Thomson, the chief digital officer at Hoorah.

This includes seamlessly building, editing, previewing, and publishing at scale, with every piece of work compliant with the brand’s CI rules. “This includes standard and mobile rich media ads with automatics creative variants across display and social with no coding required. Campaigns can be optimised through tracking and testing real-time,” he explains.

The technology allows for the creation of 60,000 personalised variants in a split second – and that can be any format, any channel, personalised video, etc. – using only one template.

“Chase lists, design rollouts disappear. Reverts done the traditional way, when a client or legal make a change and that normally takes a week to regenerate, can now happen in a split second. This is an enormous time-saving tool as well as cost-saving for brands and agencies” he adds.

Connecting the dots

The rebrand of the agency included a new logo. Presenting the new logo, Simon Spreckley, executive director, Hoorah Digital explains that the logo is made up of data and connecting dots used to see insights on audiences. “The H for Hoorah is the data point and the dots connect to form the H. The logo symbolises the bridging of the gap between creative and data and represents how it is agile and can evolve over time.”

Hoorah Digital acquires SA advertising heavyweight Simon Spreckley's Ritual Studio

Irvine Partners  25 Feb 2019

Their work demonstrates this. The campaign for ‘For Nature. For You’ sustainable apparel for client World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), for which the agency was awarded a Silver Loeries recently, was driven by data insights with creative to produce meaningful results and a positive impact, not just for the sake of it.

“This is the kind of work that inspires us because we are not behaving like an agency just producing something as an output, but we are solving business problems,” he states.

“The Hoorah brand is playful and smart with the mix of art and science at the heart of its business,” he adds.

Right technology, right people

Hoorah’s head of paid media, Vumani Ncube agrees. “You need the right people who understand technology to bring the right technology together to bring about seamless integration of the right tech, right channels and executions and most importantly the right data, feeding properly to all the channels you have running,” he says.

He explains that the agency ensures the client has the right technology in place. “Hoorah makes sure the core centralised technology is in place, while continuously testing new technologies to ensure we remain competitive and innovative.”

Next, the agency ensures the right skills are behind the technology driving it. “This includes creative, as technology and creative need to knit together to have an overall approach to media,” he adds.

Lastly, they keep an eye on the future. “For example, artificial intelligence (AI), which can take a huge load off marketers’ shoulders through automation.”

Just love this.... @hoorahdigital pic.twitter.com/bGBTSQr1KF

— @Shezza �� (@SherrinDavie) September 11, 2019

“Centralisation allows us to see how users move seamlessly across media channels and how one media channel assists the next in driving media and ad performances,” he adds.

He says that with centralisation, user journeys can be mapped out to allow for improved channel mix optimisation and the streamlining of channel strategies. “As today’s consumers have numerous devices, centralisation allows us to be device agnostic.”

Founded in 2018 by four digital marketing veterans, Hoorah Digital expanded in July 2018 when it acquired Tenzing Agency, a Durban-based design and development agency, and again in February 2019 when it acquired the creative storytelling agency, Ritual Studio.