Insight

Conversant and CJ Affiliate are two brands within the Alliance Data family, offering platforms and services to help marketing and advertising professionals deliver more personal campaigns across digital and affiliate marketing channels. The team at Conversant had a twenty-year history of delivering personalisation excellence but knew that they were not getting the recognition that the brand deserved within Europe. Conversant turned to Firefly, tasking it with disrupting the adtech and martech space. So, how could the Firefly team help Conversant and its services stand out?

Plan

Firefly created a campaign running across Conversant and CJ’s three European key markets, the UK, France and Germany, broadly divided into two sub-streams of activity. The first stream used internal data from both brands to create compelling news reports around online shopping and patterns of engagement with adverts, whilst the second was an ongoing news hijacking and storytelling stream that showed the breadth and depth of the Conversant and CJ teams’ knowledge.

Firefly worked closely with French, German and UK marketing functions at Conversant and CJ, as well as liaising with North American teams to make sure any announcements had the largest possible global impact.

“Throughout the campaign, all content was kept globally consistent but locally relevant… This meant tailoring each announcement or article with local market data, statements from local executives or 1:1 interviews with the team – all of which guaranteed that we would generate more bang for buck during campaign execution.”

– Christian Sharp, Senior Account Director, Firefly Communications.

Deliver

The Firefly team created editorial calendars of forthcoming events to hijack for Conversant, from GDPR, to the Cannes Lions event, to Facebook and Google’s latest announcements – as well as keeping an eye on breaking news for any relevant topics that could be commented on. Firefly created content, managed approval and distribution in a timely fashion, gaining press coverage quickly as news broke across all three regions.

Evaluate

Firefly delivered in excess of a hundred and forty press clippings during the first year of the campaign, including outlets such as Les Echos, The Register, Advertising Age, Digiday and Horizont. In France, 50% of all press coverage was in agreed tier one media, whilst the German team exceeded their press coverage volume target by over 50%.

“When we first hired Firefly, we considered around ten other agencies. Firefly stood out for us – they showed an understanding of our business and our goals, but most of all they were one agency with three interconnected sites across Europe… The majority of the content that we and Firefly create is localised and re-used across multiple regions, giving us much greater impact for our marketing spend. Firefly is a strategic marketing partner for us and has made a significant impact on our brand over the last couple of years.”

– Richard Burns, Head of Content and PR at Conversant and CJ’s

The Firefly team created editorial calendars of forthcoming events to hijack for Conversant, from GDPR, to the Cannes Lions event, to Facebook and Google’s latest announcements – as well as keeping an eye on breaking news for any relevant topics that could be commented on. Firefly created content, managed approval and distribution in a timely fashion, gaining press coverage quickly as news broke across all three regions.