Campaigns for global brands such as Google Translate, Knorr and Maybelline, and local brands including Danner in Denmark and Jinlingguan in China, are among the winners of the Effective Use of Tech category of the WARC Media Awards 2019.

A total of eight winners – one Grand Prix, two Golds, two Silvers and three Bronzes – have been awarded in the Effective Use of Tech category, which showcases communications that have effectively used or combined emerging platforms or technology in the media mix, contributing to the overall business success of the campaign; the jury chaired by Isabel Massey, Global Media Director, Marketing, Diageo, also awarded three Special Awards for particular areas of expertise.

The Grand Prix, and the Scalable Idea Award, went to Mindshare Sydney for Monty – The World’s first AI predictive commentator, a game-changing campaign for Australian pay TV brand Foxtel to encourage people to pay to watch cricket, a product they’d previously enjoyed for free.

Realising they had to deliver more value and transform the viewing experience, Foxtel invested heavily in data to train a custom machine-learning model capable of predicting when wickets would fall in live games. Monty delivered an 18% increase in average weekly sales, while Fox Cricket became the number-one channel for share, beating the full-year performance of every other channel.

Commenting on the Grand Prix winning campaign, jury member Rosh Singh, Managing Director EMEA, UNIT9 said: “What I liked about it is that consumers don’t need to know anything about the tech, so there are no barriers to go through – it’s additive to that piece of media.”

PHD Hong Kong picked up a Gold and the Early Adopter Award for The Irreplaceable Home Taste, a campaign for seasonings brand Knorr that used innovative In-Video Ad Insertion Technology, Knorr to connect with OTT audiences at pivotal moments of emotional engagement during a popular sitcom, without disrupting the viewing experience.

In Israel, MediaCom Connections Israel and ACW Grey Tel-Aviv won a Gold and the Platform Pioneer Award with a campaign for haircare brand Pentene. Blend-In built on the brand’s existing Beautiful Lengths programme that encouraged hair donation to people undergoing cancer treatment. A new approach mixed mass media messages with private WhatsApp groups where donors could talk privately to cancer sufferers about how much they needed their wigs.

Read more details of all the winners in the Effective Use of Tech category in the WARC Media Awards here. The final category winners, for Effective Use of Partnerships & Sponsorships, will be announced next week.

Sourced from WARC