For its first-ever participation at the prestigious Performance Marketing World Awards Global, Omnicom Media Group’s Hearts & Science MENA celebrated an impressive result: the most awarded agency, with the Grand Prix and three category winners. Two of its campaigns shone brightly: “Luxury Growth Acceleration with First-Party data” for Atlantis Dubai and “Spicing Up Creative Performance” for KFC MENA.
This is an impressive conversion rate: five entries, four shortlists, three winners, and the overall Grand Prix. That’s four out of 18 awards given on the night to agencies, media owners, advertisers and individuals, for the only representative of the Middle East in contention. Its most awarded campaign was for Atlantis Dubai (Grand Prix and winner in Ad Tech Innovation and Data & Insights) with its work for KFC MENA winning in Marketing Innovation.
Hearts & Science’s growth acceleration strategy for Atlantis Dubai used first-party data to boost loyalty sign up rates and better predict future customer behaviour. It was described by one judge as a “great use case of actually deploying audiences in the CDP for a campaign, looking at value and propensity to convert”. The strategy multiplied the conversion rate by three, compared with Facebook retargeting, and cut the CPA by 75%.
“To be selected in a tough field of more than 40 shortlisted finalists in 17 categories, by a global panel of industry leaders and experts, is both hugely gratifying and humbling. It is a spectacular reward for the team who put every inch and ounce of themselves in their client work to have it called by their peers a “superb submission” in the case of Atlantis Dubai,” Rasha Rteil, managing director of Hearts & Science, said reacting to the results. “Imagine what this means to young professionals to have their work independently praised for “solving the difficult problem of fragmented data, using tech to mine huge data sets and deliver excellent business results”. Our work, powered by the AI and machine learning of Annalect’s Creative Intelligence system to optimize the digital creatives in KFC’s campaign, has also generated a lot of excitement.”
Indeed, one judge commented: “A strong marketing Innovation submission. Combining AI with ML in the cloud and automating the process to create a scalable optimisation tool certainly improved creative ad development and media planning performance, and led to exponential business results. The revamped creatives delivered impressive increases of 73% in CTR and 160% in conversion rate.”
This is yet another validation of the value marketers find in Hearts & Science’s approach to their business challenges. Based on data, tech and analytics, its solutions go way beyond media planning and buying. In the last few weeks, the agency has won and on-boarded several new clients, including Jaguar Land Rover in 23 MENA countries, Masdar globally and DMCC. It has also witnessed a 54% rise in headcount in the past year to not only service its growing portfolio of accounts but also to engineer cutting-edge solutions that allow teams to anticipate and plan for the changes that lay ahead.
