Cedar Fair, David’s Bridal, Nodpod and Vungle are among the brands to win at this year's The Drum Digital Advertising Awards US 2020.

The current Covid-19 situation means that The Drum won’t be hosting its usual celebration dinners to announce our winners. Instead this year we’re sharing the exciting news in a variety of ways via our digital channels with all our nominees and winners.

Catch up on the virtual awards show below:

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Other winners this year included: Arm Candy, DialogTech, Marks and Spencer, Frontier Airlines, AdTheorent, Maisonette, Hybrid Theory, FastGrowingTrees.com, Anytime Fitness, Easy Group Airfare and The Trade Desk.

Grand Prix

Agency: Cramer-Krasselt    

Client: Cedar Fair: California’s Great America

Cedar Fair Entertainment Company operates major amusement and waterparks across the U.S. recently purchased two new waterpark properties to expand its 2020 footprint. However, it needed to maintain its 2019 media spending while also reaching several more markets.

By re-analysing budgets across 13 local parks and 50+ markets, and leveraging all of the data including client data, weather data, research data, and more, it successfully developed and executed a plan to prioritize/de-prioritize investments that resulted in identifying $2.3m worth of media efficiencies across plans.

Jury: “This campaign did a lot with a little to get the results needed, it’s also just a great ROI story. It a real challenge to had to manage against, but delivered on something people needed.”  

Best Video Campaign

Agency: January Digital

Client: David’s Bridal

David’s Bridal (DBI) is an anchor in the bridal market, with high brand awareness and a strong brick and mortar presence nationwide.

In order to maintain relevance with its target customer, the brand aimed to change the way its audience viewed them through digital video storytelling. This involved incorporating a more full-funnel strategy in media with content focused on their strength in variety, appealing to brides regardless of style, size, ethnicity, etc. In doing so, it was able to highlight its strengths as a brand, step into speaking more to the millennial bride, and work toward shifting consideration of those who may not have considered David’s Bridal before.

With this goal in mind, the DBI team worked alongside its agency partner, January Digital (JD) to execute a digital marketing campaign that would quickly change sentiment and ultimately drive conversions for the business.

Best Creative Optimization

Agency: Hell’s Creative

Brand: Nodpod

Nodpod tasked Hell's Creative to drastically reduce its cost per purchase from Facebook and Instagram ads.

Rising to the challenge, the agency quickly came up with a process to test more creative elements at a time. The strategy and creative team collaborated to rapidly optimize more than 200 ad creative, reducing the cost per purchase by 80% within the first month of working with Nodpod. 

Best Mobile Campaign

Agency: Vungle

Brand: Vungle

In times of crisis, creative has always been a powerful tool for communicating important messages.

Understanding this, Vungle’s Creative Labs answered the UN/WHO’s Global Call Out to Creatives to help stop the spread of Covid-19, through visual content that conveys public health messages quickly and effectively.

Vungle applied its design talent, data analytics, and gaming expertise to create playable ads that amplify these messages to gamers worldwide. These ads have achieved 53m views so far, and Vungle has also handled the creative development and ad-serving for a number of charities, achieving click rates as high as 31.62% on certain ads (Make-a-Wish). Through this campaign, Vungle has seen that in-app advertising can be a powerful tool to get the word out on key public health messages, reaching over a million people a day, and galvanizing support for charities who need help now more than ever. 

Jury: We love this, smart, simple, rapid, right tone campaign. It made sense, connects 50 countries and considered different languages to make it easy and collaborative.

For a full rundown of the winners, visit The Drum Digital Advertising Awards US website.