 The Word of Mouth Winners James Aitchison 4 December 2008 On a day that had clearly confirmed the arrival of word of mouth at marketing’s top-table, it was a fitting finale for WOM
Winner:
Aquafresh - Iso-Active launch
(Wildfire)
A social network community site enabled triallists to share product experiences and recommendations, as well as to send information to a friend, read in-depth brand regime briefings, and discover where to buy the product.
The results included 578,000 brand page-views, over 200,000 product trials and an intention to purchase rate that was five times higher among influencers than the national average. 
Best Accelerator Award
Winner:
O2 - Orgy of Fun (ZenithOptimedia) This word of mouth campaign aimed to win back students and promote O2's Unlimited tariff. The 'big idea' for the campaign was 'The O2 Unlimited Orgy of Fun' - four weeks of group challenges with weekly prizes up for grabs, culminating in the chance to win one of four 'It's a Knockout' style end-of-term parties for the participants' entire university. Some 250 student brand ambassadors were appointed to spread the word face-to-face, working alongside targeted communications on social networking websites. As a result of the campaign, student awareness of the tariff doubled from 21% to 43%; the metric 'it's a brand for students' also rose from 54% to 71%. O2 also showed an average increase of 77% against all brand statements among students for the campaign period, outstripping Orange at 54%.
After the campaign finished, 88% of students questioned were either 'likely' or 'very likely' to recommend the brand. O2 was also previously described as a 'brand my friends use' by 68% of students; this figure subsequently rose to 77%. 
Best Targeting Award
Joint winner:
FOXTEL - Gossip Girl - The Chosen
(Naked Communications & The Population)
FOXTEL, an Australian pay-TV provider, was launching Gossip Girl, an American drama set in
'You're nobody until you're talked about' is the tagline for the show, and the use of an exclusive, word of mouth platform therefore aligned perfectly with the show's plot line. Dramas hadn't performed strongly on FOX8 previously, and the launch campaign for Gossip Girl aimed to take a completely new strategy. This involved creating a targeted online community hub; seeding content and key information from the show to the community; harnessing word-of-mouth through 'ripple' to raise awareness of the show and content to truly influential people; and to empower 'influentials' to spread news and content amongst their social connections.
The campaign targeted females with an appetite for being 'in the know'. Over the course of the six-week Gossip Girl campaign, 150,000 emails were sent, and psychometric testing was used to identify respondents as 'influencers'. As a result of the word of mouth generated, FOX8 almost doubled its primetime share for 2007, recording 4.0% prime time share, with its share for the timeslot up 5.6 share points to 6.7%. Naked's Geoff Gray and Leah Tennant pick up the Best Targeting Award
 STA Travel had a good reputation, but also suffered from the mistaken perception that it could only be used by people under the age of 26. This word of mouth campaign thus aimed to spread engaging conversations about the brand online, both by turning STA customers into a proactive band of brand advocates, and also by collaborating with various web-based travel communities.
Communications targeted people that had already booked long distance global travel with the company, which mainly included students and young independent travelers. It also aimed to interact with career breakers, culture vultures and older travelers. A 'WOM World' was created to allow consumers to communicate with each other, and also to provide updates and expert content. The STAtravelbuzz platform doubled overall WOM for STA Travel, with 'STA Explorers', a core audience for the brand, responsible for 30% of all word of mouth, and driving two-thirds of all positive conversations.
Best Measurement Award
Winner: Axe/Lynx - UK Dinner Party (Mesh Planning & Unilever)
The intention was that the cool guys (and girls) would use the catchphrase in social situations, such as while flirting in clubs. The campaign revolved around four TV executions, supported by posters and competitions. The success of the campaign was measured using TROI, a real-time research approach that aims to capture experiences as they happen by asking participants appropriate to the target audience to send texts whenever they see, hear or experience anything to do with the brand being surveyed.
The figures from the Lynx/Axe case showed that the catchphrase spread quickly among the core demographic, and that the combination of TV and posters were important in prompting use of the term. Research also showed that it was necessary to keep rolling out new creative executions to keep the campaign fresh, and also that the campaign would wear out if kept going too long.
Judges’ Special Award
Winner: 1000heads, which submitted:
For a full list entrants to the 2008 awards, click here. WOM Panel: Best in class James Aitchison 3 December 2008
The growth in interest in WOM has led to a “large land grab” among competing communications professionals, Leo Rayman of Weber Shandwick told delegates in the post-lunch panel session.
His agency's take on WOM, he said, was about generating “remarkable advocacy” (although he qualified that by saying PR was sometimes about trying to reduce negative WOM).
He illustrated with a case study of a campaign that ran in the
Shandwick Weber focused on US election news junkies in a localised “TV on your PC” campaign that targeted news bloggers in the Seattle area, by giving them access to “ MSNBC News Beta ”, an online news channel, which included exclusive content.
The campaign used a 4-step model to stimulate WOM – identify advocates, recruit them, ignite their interest, expand that interst – and resulting data from Nielsen blogpulse showed a big spike in online conversations about the campaign's “TV on your PC” theme.
Rayman offered these lessons for wannabe WOM marketers:
“The smartest thing, he said, “is to stimulate conversations that are already going on out there, rather than trying to push out your own message all about you.”
Speights beer goes sailing
Like Fallon’s Mark Sinnock earlier in the day, John Woodward from Publicis explained how his agency is refocusing its activities around WOM, and creating “contagious ideas that change the conversation”. The global planning boss added that “all marketing is word of mouth” now for the French-owned agency network, although such an approach has brought significant challenges. “How do you use classical media to generate advocacy?" he asked. "And how do you structure an agency and manage a team for that output?”
As a case in point, Speights was a
With a marketing problem that could not be solved by its main-media-advertising purchasing power (which would have bought it about three weeks of TV), Publicis devised a radical strategy. It built a Speights ale house on a ship that made a 10-week voyage to
Take this story from New Zealand’s TV3:
Reflecting on the emphasis that Publicis now puts on “contagious ideas”, Woodward said that agencies need a new way of evaluating creative, which moves away from asking “do I like it?” to considering, “what will others say about it?”.
And they also need “a new operating paradigm,” he believed. During the Speights campaign, for example, film footage from the boat was fed to websites, media and TV screens in WOM Practice, WOM Proof James Aitchison 3 December 2008
Practice
Quoting the cyber seer, William Gibson - “the future’s already here, it’s just unevenly distributed” - Paul Kemp-Robertson concluded the opening session with an example-rich march through the practical application of WOM-inducing marketing strategies.
“The audience has always been ahead of the advertiser,” the Contagious magazine co-founder and editor told delegates, giving the story of how photographs of the filming of the original Sony Bravia ‘Balls’ ad in San Francisco were uploaded onto Flickr by local onlookers well ahead of the finished ad. Fast-forward to 2008, and Sony made a conscientious decision to involve the local community in the production around it’s Miami-based “Foam” commercial.
Such a change of approach reflects many of the wider key trends that characterise – and necessitate - the sort of non-invasive, consumer-radar-dodging marketing techniques upon which Contagious focuses. According to Kemp-Robertson, the forces at work include:
Proof
Dave Balter’s call for hardline ROI earlier in the day didn’t go unanswered, because the post-break session opened with back-to-back presentations from US-based WOM practitioners on proving the worth of word of mouth.
“There’s been an explosion of interest in academic and industry circles about measuring word of mouth,” said Walter J. Carl, founder of ChatThreads. “Companies start with an interest, dip their toe in and experiment. But after that, accountability becomes vital.”
He identified four ways in which WOM adds value to a brand:
Similarly, he said there were four competing models to measure WOM, although all are based on calculating a Customer Lifetime Value and a Customer Referral Value. ChatThreads’ G2X Analytics platform enables WOM activity to be tracked, mapped and valued as messages are spread across networks.
Chris Ramsey followed up on the similar theme of identifying ROI in social media. As V-P of Radian6, he comes from a company that build tools to enable brands to monitor and analyse what’s being said about them in all forms of social media. He was essentially applying sound, traditional measurement logic to this new arena: set clear, specific and measurable campaign outputs and business objectives from the outset. WOM Panel: a Marketer’s Guide James Aitchison Wednesday 3 December
Paul Marsden, director of Clickadvisor.com and chair of the 2008 Word of Mouth Marketing Masterclass, opened proceedings with a very contemporary example of WOM at work. But he didn’t talk about the sort of premeditated campaign from any of the “biggest brains in WOM” (which is how he described the roster of speakers that followed).
He was referring, in fact, to the slating that Stephen Fry recently gave the new Blackberry Storm on Twitter. The British media personality’s disparaging stream of consciousness ("...shockingly bad. I mean embarrassingly awful...") led to a BBC news story to ask: Can Stephen Fry kill a gadget?
In the WOM Marketers’ Guide panel session that followed, BzzAgent’s Dave Balter was certain that he could. “One individual’s opinion can drastically change the destiny of a product,” he said, “and companies can’t go along waiting for the Stephen Fry effect.”
The growing importance of WOM was echoed by fellow panellist, Fallon’s Mark Sinnock. “We are redesigning the structures in our business to utilise social media,” he revealed. “It’s almost becoming an entire creative strategy in its own right.”
Sinnock, a partner in the agency that brought the world the Cadbury Gorilla, explained the reason for this step change. “We’re fundamentally seeing a move away from a regulated behaviour around brands to a deregulated behaviour in which brands always need to be on. We’re moving from Unique Selling Propositions and Emotional Selling Propositions to Dynamic Selling Propositions.”
From a client-side perspective, Mark Schulz from telecoms provider O2 gave a more prosaic assessment. “Consumers will interrogate a product through world of mouth,” he said, giving the example of the iPhone as “the most passed around gadget in pubs.”
O2, he said, was aware of the “Stephen Fry effect”, but the brand’s real focus was closer to home: “It’s what our millions of customers that are saying on the bus that’s important to us.”
He cited the brand’s “Orgy of Fun” WOM campaign in support of its O2 Unlimited package, which targeted students and their (real-life) social networks by engaging them in a series of UCG-generating challenges (uploading group photos, videos etc).
It was Dave Balter, the BzzAgent boss whose company offers a research network of some 500,000 individuals across North America and the
Balter actually went further, saying that WOM needed to offer be able to offer the sort of ROI metrics that’s now routinely demanded of main-media advertising.
“Somewhere down the line,” he argued, the client is going to ask: ‘Did this thing drive sales?’ And the important thing is delivering a communication dividend, a value per conversation. To be able to say, 'I spent one pound per conversation and it netted me one pound fifty'. That’s the metric that it’s going to come down to.”
You’d expect this purist approach from a WOM agency seeking parity in the accountability stakes with longer-established marketing disciplines. But for more general agency folk, isolating the WOM element of a campaign seemed less of an imperative - maybe because it's so difficult.
“If I can get people involved in the brand in any way, it absolutely trumps engagement. At Fallon, we look at word of mouth as part of the larger narrative, the glue that sticks everything together. It’s not the net sale,” said Mark Sinnock.
He conceded that it’s hard to quantify and isolate the effects of word of mouth, particularly with, say, the Cadbury Gorilla, that ran concurrently as a TV ad and viral. He also cited the example of the work Fallon did for Sony Bravia. It generated a lot of buzz and noise around the brand but, when it came to equating that to sales, all he could say with certainty was that “stock was shifting while the campaign was on.”
Mark Schulz's attitude to accountability steered a middle-way between the views of his fellow panellists. O2, he explained, tries to link specific WOM initiatives to the take-up of the products, tariffs and packages it's promoting. “It’s easy to see how many people are connecting to a tariff like O2 Unlimited,” he said. He also explained how the brand relied on tracking research for slightly softer measures. For example, it measures consumer awareness levels of the fact that O2 customers are entitled to advance tickets for events at the London O2 Arena, the entertainment venue that it sponsors.
Despite a divergence of opinion on the specifics of WOM and its measurement, all the panellists had specific recommendations as to why brand marketers should adopt WOM strategies.
Dave Balter: “This is happening anyway. You can hope it goes away or you can harness a fundamental shift in how consumers are interacting with products.”
Mark Sinnock: “It enables much richer and deeper consumer relationships with brands.”
Mark Schulz: “WOM is the communication that customers trust the most.”  Comments on this post:Great conferenceComment from: Jon Leach, Bell Pottinger Group Posted at: 3 December 2008 Great case studies and also some great numbers. I was inspired to think more on this and wrote it up here http://patternrecognition.typepad.com/ Are we in danger of taking a superficial approach to advocacy? Anna Sampson, Rise Communications Monday 1 December
In our final guest post ahead of the Word of Mouth Marketing Masterclass, Rise Communications' Anna Sampson takes a closer look at advocacy. Most marketers these days think about targeting advocates to spread positive stories about their brand; especially in a downturn, this is a highly cost-effective approach. Some may even go as far as to identify who their advocates are; identifying a demographic profile or discrete segment. But is this really enough? Does it really move the game on? Or is it just a nudge in the right direction? I’d argue it really only scratches the surface and there are some key questions missing from the above. Firstly, you need to understand who your advocates are talking to, since there is little point in motivating them to spread the word if they are not talking to someone who is receptive to their arguments or if they are preaching to the converted. And secondly, you also need to ask who receivers are more likely to listen to and what sort of advocates do they consider credible? A truly effective advocacy approach, that is much more targeted and thought through, manages to link up your advocates and receivers. If you are prepared to ask these questions and spend time determining the answers, your advocacy strategy is much more likely to be successful. Without doing so, you could develop a word of mouth strategy in vein, as your advocates may not successfully convert anyone and your receivers may not be exposed to any views from people they consider worth listening to. We know from our own detailed study of advocacy, Planning4Advocacy, that in many sectors friends and family are the most popular sources of recommendation. So one approach is to use your customer base to convert those of a similar profile. However, in some sectors it’s more complicated, with receivers preferring to seek out a more expert opinion. We found this to be true in the automotive sector where journalists and car enthusiasts are more popular sources. Like any marketing strategy, you can’t just identify your target and leave it at that. You also need develop appropriate messages and content. This means uncovering what subject matter gets your advocates talking and what hot topics your receivers are keen to hear about. So if you really want to pursue an advocacy strategy, don't just identify your advocates and prompt them with a generic message, because that's only really half the job done. Instead, go the extra mile and ensure you identify advocates and receivers that connect with each other and find a topic that motivates the former to talk and the latter to listen. Why focusing on the negative is positive Megan Butler, Rise Communications Monday 24 November 2008
Next up in our series of guest posts from speakers at the Word of Mouth Marketing Masterclass, Rise Communications' Meg Butler explains why brands overlook detractors at their peril. Brand owners are starting to acknowledge the need to talk to, nurture and harness the power of their brand advocates. But what about their detractors - those who actively recommend against their brand? You all know that a 1% increase in Net Promoter Score was calculated to be worth an average of £8.82m in revenue. (You knew that, right?). But did you know that a 1% reduction in negative advocacy is worth £24.8m? One brand that found this out the hard way is Starbucks. It's suffered for some years with image problems and, in response, has made a concerted effort with fair trade support and local community alliances. But it was badly stung recently when a story broke about its stores leaving the tap running all day. I saw that this had been muttering along in many forums for some time and, sure enough, it eventually found its way into more mainstream media. Sounds trivial? 'Buzz' for the brand dropped almost overnight to minus 13%, according to Brand Index. The taps are off now but it could cost the business dear to correct this decline in brand health when, by listening to its brand detractors instead, Starbucks could have spotted the issue and moved pre-emptively. It can be done: by acknowledging the issues of detractors, brand health and profitability can be transformed. For example, 4 years after 'Supersize Me', McDonald's recorded its best sales for 10 years last year. Visits in the UK were up nearly 10m year-on-year, including 320,000 additional new customers. How? The restaurant chain embraced a more open approach, with commitments on food quality, food content and CSR. It also successfully redesigned its stores and, crucially, adjusted its menu to provide more 'healthy' alternatives (such as porridge for breakfast, fruit and smoothies for kids, organic milk). Detractors and negative word of mouth can have just as big a say in a brand's fortunes as any advocates, and marketers should start paying more attention. Our own research into a number of key sectors demonstrated how important this can be. Interestingly, in the mobile sector, there are no networks with a positive NPS score - only brands that are 'less bad' than others (this is even worse than banks which, at the moment, is saying something!). Maybe the fact that consumers are being trained to shop around every 12 months for the best deal is a cause? It's certainly interesting that the 'least bad' brand is O2, a network that has arguably done more than most competitors to foster and reward the loyalty of its users. Recognising that a glossy 'brand' ad can only do so much (surely everyone is aware of O2 by now?), its has invested in eCRM, rewards linked to its entertainment properties like the arena or the festival, and innovative areas like its Blue Room. But to unlock real success, is O2 listening to what its detractors are saying, and acting accordingly? We found that those who had recently joined a network were the biggest advocates of that network, and I would be willing to bet that those who have most recently left a network are also its most vocal detractors. So, why did they leave? Some brands do listen and use these detractors positively: take LG. Its products might not be the best in the market, but its response to criticism and user feedback is something others could learn from. By participating openly in user forums, its is able to respond immediately with representatives from its R&D department talking to consumers directly about why products work as they do (or don't), and how their comments might be taken into account for future development. What's more, the company confidently invites feedback and involve consumers in making products better. Suddenly, by being involved in a brand and feeling much closer to it, those detractors might even become advocates. WOM, awards and Bom Chicka Wah Wah Fiona Blades Monday 24 November 2008
Continuing our series of guest posts from speakers at the Word of Mouth Marketing Masterclass, MESH Planning's Fiona Blades previews the Lynx/Axe case study she'll be presenting with Ana Medeiros from Unilever during the roundtable sessions, and reflects on the wider status of WOM as a marketing discipline. In the last month, I've been immersed in WOM. Not only have clients been asking for a closer evaluation of their word of mouth touchpoints, but I've been lucky enough to be invited onto the WARC WOM judging panel and also to speak at the WOMMA Research Symposium in Las Vegas. All of this has given me plenty to think about next week's WOM Marketing Masterclass. Anyone involved in marketing has always known intuitively that word of mouth is important but, until recently, it's been difficult to know how important it really is. Now, with the explosion of social media and blogs, word of mouth is becoming much more visible. Brands can't afford to ignore what people are saying about them. This has stimulated new monitoring services to pick up WOM in the digital space. But, with 95% of WOM happening offline, new approaches are being developed to measure this, too. In the US, The Keller Fay Group is the first full service research agency dedicated to word of mouth, both online and offline. Interestingly, it has found more positive word of mouth associated with brands than negative. At MESH Planning, we pick up word of mouth in our TROI (Touchpoint Return on Investment) studies, because we capture every interaction that someone has with a brand using the participant's own mobile phone. The case study that I will be talking through at the Masterclass next week with Ana Medeiros from Unilever - 'Capturing how a catchphrase caught on' - illustrates how we picked up the spread of the Bom Chicka Wah Wah catchphrase for Lynx/Axe. If you're not familiar, here's an ad from YouTube: It genuinely feels as though we are at the start of a new marketing era. Many years ago, as a marketing manager on pet foods, my time was spent on TV advertising and in-store promotions. Now, there are specific marketing agencies springing up devoted to creating WOM marketing strategies for brands, some of which will be talking at the WARC conference. At the moment, there are some great examples of how WOM campaigns have worked successfully. It was a real pleasure to read the submissions for the WARC WOM awards to see what is being accomplished (the winners will be revealed next week, and you can find the shortlisted entries on an earlier post on this blog). But as a discipline, we are at the start of this journey and there is plenty for us all to learn. With new WOM specialists and new measures we should be able to get to the point (as the advertising industry did through the IPA Effectiveness Awards) where we truly understand the value of word of mouth and the way it can successfully drive a brand. A prediction for 2009: WOM goes global Dave Balter Friday 21 November 2008
Next up in our series of guest posts from speakers at the Word of Mouth Marketing Masterclass, BzzAgents's Dave Balter looks forward to what WOM will bring us in 2009. It's almost the end of the year, and you know what that means: year-to-come predictions. So, here is mine for 2009: a major brand will implement the very first integrated, global word of mouth program. Two trends are converging to make this outcome inevitable:
Regardless of location or cultural norms, the evidence points to the fact that our word of mouth behaviors across continents are more similar than they are different. The global landscape for word of mouth is just beginning to take shape. The idea of one person talking to another knows few boundaries - regardless of how far apart you live or what your main choice of communication happens to be. Executing a cross-cultural WOM program won't be easy. It will demand that:
But it will happen because the truth is hard to avoid: no matter where you live or what your cultural disposition, the opinions we generate are the bonds that link us all. Recession victim or recession victor? John Woodward, Publicis Worldwide Thursday 20 November 2008
Continuing the series of guest posts from speakers at the Word of Mouth Marketing Masterclass, Publicis Worldwide's John Woodward looks at the prospects for WOM as we enter recession. Word of mouth promises free media, or almost, so you might expect it to do well in a recession. But, if I'm honest, that's not what I really think will happen. I expect clients to pull back on things that they view as 'experiments'. Many of them still view TV as 'proven effective', and they view the 5-20% of their media budgets that they put into other things (even on-line activity, in some cases) as 'money they could afford to lose'. So if they need to save media dollars, I bet I know the sort of projects that will get cut. It's not humanly surprising, for all sorts of reasons:
So, is all lost? I don't think so. In the short term, I think many people will make false steps by cutting projects that could be great, or (even worse) by shaving the wrong things off projects and condemning them to failure. (Many times we've seen great ideas fail to deliver because at the last minute - after the site was built or the film was shot - 'the client couldn't afford the on-line PR budget'). But we'll pass through that. People will start to live with the squeeze and innovation will come back to the market. We'll all start to realise that a recession isn't the end of the world, it's just the start of a tougher world, where innovation is a condition of survival. We'll start to look at (for many) lower media weights and fewer weeks on air, and start to realise that word of mouth is needed to extend presence and visibility, and that even when we do main media campaigns, they have to be executed so as to create their own word of mouth amplification. Most of all, recession will teach us to be precise in our thinking, and more accountable. There'll be less 'we might', 'wouldn't it be cool if'. Instead, there'll be clearer identification of audiences and channels, stronger measurement, and a harder headed evaluation of whether value was created. In short, word of mouth will be forced to grow up. Carrie’s Macbook: spreading the word for Sex and the City Chris Edwards, New Media Maze Wednesday, 19 November 2008 In the first in a series of guest posts ahead of the Word of Mouth Marketing Masterclass, New Media Maze's Chris Edwards previews the Sex and the City case study that colleague Dave Smith will be presenting during the roundtable sessions. Sex and the City was as synonymous with the late 90’s urban female fashionista as Jimmy Choo shoes and Prada handbags, providing a platform not only to relate to, but aspire to become. Fans of the show are extremely passionate and knowledgeable, so we wanted to do something that reached out to them, gave them a real SATC experience and, more importantly, got them talking. Throughout its six years on TV, lead character Carrie Bradshaw would begin and end each show by typing on her Mac computer. Can you really imagine someone so fashion- and style-conscious using anything else? So we looked into how we could use this to effectively ‘break down the fourth wall’ - the boundary between the audience and the fiction, and let the fans into Carrie’s world. The outcome was the Carrie’s MacBook piece. 
Carrie’s Macbook allowed users to explore the ‘virtual desktop’ of their favourite fashionista. Visitors were challenged to answer trivia questions in chat windows with other characters from the show to unlock exclusive content and get the chance to win official Sex and the City goodies. By using the film script, we were able to draw inspiration and faithfully bring Carrie’s desktop world to life with her own emails, calendar, stickies and a whole host of hidden extras that would keep any fan amused for hours. Our development team were tasked with re-creating the Mac OSX operating system for a web-based viral campaign, from the login screen right through to how the navigation is animated – all within the confines of flash, of course, and the knowledge that an unfaithful representation would antagonise countless Apple-philes across cyberspace. Initially launched from the official site, Carrie’s Macbook broke all targets with over 200,000 unique views and a staggering average time on site of 6:30 min, coverage in leading trade press, as well as creating further interest and stimulating debate in hundreds of blogs, forums and social network groups. WOM Awards shortlist: the magnificent seven James Aitchison 14 November 2008 It's just been announced that O2, Aquafresh, Axe/Lynx and STA Travel are among the seven entries shortlisted for prizes at the inaugural Word of Mouth Marketing Awards. The eventual winners will be unveiled at the WOM Masterclass on 2 December, with their fate in the hands of this esteemed panel of judges: 
Pictured from left to right: Carlos Grande (WARC), Alex Ricketts (Royal Mail), Richard Moss (WeberShandwick), Patrice Bendon (Experian), Ivan Palmer (Wildfire), Paul Marsden (clickadvisor.com), Steve Barton (WOM UK president and chairman of judges), Fiona Blades (Mesh Planning), Andy Crysell (CrowdDNA), Mark Earls (Herdmeister), Matthew Coombs (WARC) Contenders for the 'Grand Prix for the Best Demonstration of Effectiveness' are:
The 'Best Identification and Targeting of Influencers' hopefuls are:
Those with their eye on the prize for 'Best Use of Creativity/Accelerator' are:
And the front-runners for 'Best Measurement of Results' include:
"Great entries. Great judges. And one of the most interesting debates over who should win an award that I've ever been a part of," said Steve Barton, president of WOM UK and chairman of the judging panel. "An industry is often defined by the work that it finds award-winning," he added, "and by that measure, WOMM is innovative, coming of age and delivering a significant return. But don't take it from me. Read the papers and see for yourself." Fortunately, all the shortlisted papers will be coming to WARC Online soon after the awards ceremony, so you won't have long to wait. Coming soon 7 November 2008 WARC Online will be reporting direct from the WOM Masterclass, as well as publishing news and guest posts in the run-up to the event. Check back regularly over coming weeks. In the meantime, full event details can be found at the WARC Store. |   Blog postsThe Word of Mouth Winners4 December 2008 WOM Panel: Best in class 3 December 2008 WOM Practice, WOM Proof 3 December 2008 WOM Panel: a Marketer’s Guide Wednesday 3 December Comments (1) Are we in danger of taking a superficial approach to advocacy? Monday 1 December Why focusing on the negative is positive Monday 24 November 2008 WOM, awards and Bom Chicka Wah Wah Monday 24 November 2008 A prediction for 2009: WOM goes global Friday 21 November 2008 Recession victim or recession victor? Thursday 20 November 2008 Carrie’s Macbook: spreading the word for Sex and the City Wednesday, 19 November 2008 WOM Awards shortlist: the magnificent seven 14 November 2008 Coming soon 7 November 2008   |
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