This year, 13 Promotion Marketing Awards of Asia gold winners from Singapore, China, Korea and Japan, will represent the region. Apart from recognising agencies and clients for the most creative and effective campaigns, the entries are now becoming an important indicator as to how customers' reactions feature in future promotion planning. Following on the awards, there will be a report on the best, the most creative, the unusual, the new, from the APMA 2002 Globes. But here are some findings from a number of the current finalists:
- The use of free gifts with purchase has risen in all regions. Customers are supporting brands, which offer a free gift, rather than a chance to win. In some areas, budgets are being adapted to cover this cost, maximising slippage factors to reduce actual redemptions.
- The need for physical pack proofs of purchase, particularly bar codes, has dropped in favour of electronic response via email, internet and SMS.
This trend is no doubt reflecting the importance of communicating promotional messages to young customers.
- In keeping with the growth of premiums, ongoing bonus offers, negotiated with compatible third party partners is growing. Many of these companies see this partnership as quasi-replacements for their advertising campaigns.
- Interactive promotions are now more visible, but at a fraction of the costs when they first emerged. These include virtual competitions, TV viewer IQ tests, virtual fund-raising via IVR and online capabilities, virtual coupons and now virtual collector cards, overlaid with ongoing emailed loyalty aspects.
- Third party-led generation from promotion marketing campaigns was also present on entry forms. Promotions are low-cost opportunities for prize partners to capture customer information as well as from publicity the promotion offers. In these days of corporate downsizing, some companies are offering commissions to agencies for verifying leads generated. Email offers a cost effective opportunity to consolidate this new revenue stream.
- Many promotion agencies now own proprietorial products, services and licences and use these to partner with clients, combining skills. Apart from direct, field services and interactive areas, other subsets are forming in areas of sports, entertainment and tourism.
In Australia, our agency is a licensee to Soccer Australia to capture and market national soccer league statistics. We are also a content licensee to Telstra Australia for their soccer site which we built and host.
