Inside Indicia and Very's DMA Grand Prix-winning campaign

The ‘Work It Baby’ campaign picked up three awards on the night, leaving Vanessa Preece, head of customer recruitment at Very owner Shop Direct Group, "ecstatic" in her own words.

Preece paid tribute to the agency’s decade-long relationship with Shop Direct, describing the awards as the "epitome of our partnership" and praising the campaign, which aimed to recruit new credit customers to Very, for exceeding expectations.

According to Ian Bates, creative director at Indicia, the agency came up with an idea for extending Very’s offering from fashion for young women to clothing and accessories for mothers and babies. There was no TV budget and in a crowded market the positioning had to be distinctive.

Bates said: "What we tried to do was to find an engaging way for Very to move into a very established market sector – you’ve got Mothercare, Boots, Mamas and Papas, Argos etcetera all in that zone – we knew we needed to punch above our weight."

Indicia built its campaign around working up to the unveiling of the fashion show on a Very microsite, engaging online communities with teaser backstage video content relating to the mystery event and asking people who wanted to see it to provide their email address.

A data trail of the products prospects browsed on the microsite was used to populate and personalise follow-up emails.

As a result Very attracted nearly 50,000 leads and 4,795 new customers, of whom 92% chose a credit option, generating an estimated lifetime value over five years of £3.4m.

Bates said: "People might think that direct marketing is still about small stuff – it’s about small stuff that means big stuff."

The campaign was praised by DMA Awards committee chair Mike Colling (of MC&C) for modernising a traditional mail order campaign "in every way you can imagine".

The chair of judges, Lord Smith of Finsbury, praised it for its innovative approach to using new media.

"Faced with low recognition results at the outset, Indicia thought intelligently about how to get messages out to their target audience, how to encourage responses from potential customers, how to draw consumers in, and how to drive customer leads and product sales.

"The result has been a higher profile and more sales. This wasn’t just using online space to reiterate messages from traditional space; it was using online space in a new and highly creative way."

Watch the fashion show below

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