Econsultancy: Econsultancy today announces the winners of its 2010 Innovation Awards.

Gatwick Airport, Dell, Jimmy Choo, Jessops, CNN and British Airways are among the winners of the awards which recognise pioneering developments in digital marketing and e-commerce.

Hiscox wins both the B2B and Online Advertising awards for its location-based targeting of insurance adverts, while Shutl is named the winner of the Innovation in E-commerce category for its "game-changing" service which enables shoppers to specify when they want to receive deliveries.

The award for Most Innovative Digital Agency goes to Redweb, while LBi / bigmouthmedia wins the award for Most Innovative Digital Marketing Team.

The full list of winners and highly commended entries for the 21 different categories is below.

The winning entries were selected by Econsultancy and an international panel selected from companies themselves known for innovation such as BBC, Mercedes-Benz, Dell, Telefonica (O2), Dupont and BT. The awards, now in their third year, attracted more than 350 entries.

Digital thought leaders such as Paul Boag, Sam Decker and Ian Jindal were also part of the judging panel, as well as Econsultancy CEO Ashley Friedlein, Director of Innovation Chris Lake, and Research Director Linus Gregoriadis.

Econsultancy CEO Ashley Friedlein said: "2010 was another exceptional year for digital innovation, and this is reflected by the extremely high calibre of awards entries we have received from around the world.

"It is always difficult to narrow down so many great entries but we believe the list of winners and commended entrants is a showcase for some of the best developments in this space over the last year."

The Innovation Awards were set up as part of Econsultancy's commitment to recognising innovation in the digital sector, as demonstrated by its regularly updated Innovation Report.

The Winners Dinner will take place on Wednesday 9 February 2011 in central London. Winners receive complimentary tickets as part of their prize. Otherwise, seats cost £195+VAT.

Email awards@econsultancy.com to reserve your place. Priority will be given to winners, entries which were ‘highly commended' and those on the shortlist.

Innovation in Affiliate Marketing

• Affiliate Window & myThings (WINNER)

• Buy.at & Coull (Highly Commended)

About the winning entry:

With its unique CPA business model and partnerships with affiliate networks, myThings has brought personalised retargeting to the affiliate marketing domain. Advertisers only pay for actual sales generated by personalised retargeting campaigns, as with their affiliate programs.

Innovation in B2B Marketing

• Hiscox (WINNER)

• TradeDoubler and SceneStealer for Dell SMB (Highly Commended)

About the winning entry:

Hiscox targeted small business professionals working away from their office and home using wi-fi hotspots. As users waited to be connected, they were served with adverts for business insurance.

Innovation in E-commerce

• Shutl (WINNER)

• Kiddicare (Highly Commended)

• SciVisum (Highly Commended)

About the winning entry:

Shutl is the first company worldwide to ‘solve' delivery by enabling shoppers to get their purchases when they want; either immediately or within a one-hour window of their choice, same-day or any-day, for a price that is comparable to standard delivery.

Innovation in Email Marketing

• e-Dialog and British Airways (WINNER)

About the winning entry:

To promote the launch and maximise downloads of the Executive Club mobile application, BA and e-Dialog developed a unique strategy, using historical customer data to target smartphone users in a highly targeted email-to-mobile campaign.

Innovation in Mobile Marketing

• Golley Slater Digital (WINNER)

• Marks & Spencer/Mobile Interactive Group (Highly Commended)

About the winning entry:

This augmented reality iPhone app helps people to visualise the strength of the pollen based on real-time data feeds linked to a localised pollen count forecast.

Innovation in Multichannel Marketing

• Jessops (WINNER)

• Flightglobal - a part of Reed Business Information (Highly Commended)

About the winning entry:

Exceptional multichannel experience combining four channels, namely store, online, call centre and catalogue. Jessops' market-leading reserve online and collect-in-store service allows customers to visit the store and collect their goods, whilst receiving specialist advice from the dedicated photographic retailer. Its ‘advice for life' promise on all purchases was supported by a £1m staff training programme.

Innovation in Online Customer Service

• Gatwick Airport (WINNER)

• Netflights (Highly Commended)

• Reevoo (Highly Commended)

About the winning entry:

London Gatwick Airport is the first airport in Europe to offer 24-hour Twitter support, the first airport worldwide to use mobile barcodes as information points and the first airport worldwide to roll out a mobile and web-based retailer review section using Qype.

Innovation in Online Marketing Research or Customer Insight

• Intrepid - An Alterian Company and CNN International (WINNER)

About the winning entry:

Faced with a plethora of social media measurement tools CNNI concluded no single tool could produce accurate insight to prove the commercial power of news sharing and recommendation.

CNNI commissioned Intrepid to create an integrated research methodology that broke through limitations of traditional insight and monitoring tools.

Innovation in Online PR

• Stickyeyes (WINNER)

About the winning entry:

The Foursquare Race to The North Pole PR Campaign combined traditional PR techniques with the power of location-based marketing and mobile. The campaign successfully gave the story a much wider reach in order to raise the profile of the charity trek and the agency's client, Carole Nash Motorbike Insurance.

Innovation in Paid Search / PPC

• Net Media Planet (WINNER)

• DC Storm (Highly Commended)

About the winning entry:

Search agency Net Media Planet harnessed the YouTube Video Targeting Tool and its own Mercury technology platform to overlay adverts for celebrity perfumes by targeting and matching thousands of high profile celebrity YouTube videos. The Perfume Shop's revenue from this approach outstripped normal search engine PPC sales.

Innovation in Rich Media and Video

• BroadView (WINNER)

• Buto (Highly Commended)

• YuMe (Highly Commended)

About the winning entry:

The Virgin Holidays web buying experience was humanised through the projection of a virtual sales adviser on to the screen, apparently walking off the page and into the viewer's world. The BroadView implementation broke new ground in the use of video to upsell, resulting in a 30% uplift in the sales of Upper Class tickets by Virgin Holidays.

Innovation in SEO / Natural Search

• Linkdex Limited (WINNER)

About the winning entry:

Linkdex presents businesses of all sizes with an end-to-end SEO tool. Its proprietary crawling and filtering algorithms allow the system to show causality between actions and SEO results, and provide fresh data which can be segmented and acted upon.

Innovation in Social Media

• Jimmy Choo and FreshNetworks (WINNER)

About the winning entry:

Jimmy Choo, a global luxury shoe and accessories brand, harnessed social media, and in particular Foursquare, to help launch its new trainer collection. Foursquare's own Head of Business Development, Tristan Walker, said The Jimmy Choo Trainer Hunt was: "Probably my favourite campaign that I've seen in social media. Period."

Innovation in User Experience

• Fortune Cookie (WINNER)

• Box UK (Highly Commended)

About the winning entry:

Working with its digital agency Fortune Cookie, Europcar was the first travel company in Europe to offer Microsoft Surface tables to provide customers with a new and unique way of planning their onward journeys. The first interactive touch-driven table was initially rolled out for customers at Europcar outlets in Heathrow's Terminal 5 and Munich Airport. Europcar also became the first travel company in the world to have its own multi-touch application for Windows 7.

Innovation in Web Analytics and Optimization

• AdInsight Limited (WINNER)

About the winning entry:

AdInsight Clarity tackles the complicated problem of accurately tying phone call conversions to online visitors by allocating each visitor a unique telephone number for the entire time they are engaged with the website. It reports on how each caller found the website, what search phrases they used and which pages they viewed before during and after they called. It works by tracking an unlimited number of keywords through to a phone call and integrates with third party analytics solutions such as Google Analytics and Adwords to allow the offline conversions to be reported alongside online data.

Innovation in Web Content Management

• BBC Future Media and Technology (WINNER)

About the winning entry:

The BBC World Cup 2010 website was a significant step change in the way that content is published. Its dynamic semantic publishing framework facilitates the publication of automated metadata-driven web pages that are light-touch, requiring minimal journalistic management, as they automatically aggregate and render links to relevant stories.

Most Innovative Digital Agency

• Redweb (WINNER)

• Essence (Highly Commended)

• Rockfish (Highly Commended)

About the winning entry:

Significant investment in digital thinking though collaboration with Bournemouth University, an innovation department and projects such as chromacam.co.uk.

Most Innovative Digital Marketing Team

• LBi/bigmouthmedia (WINNER)

• first direct (Highly Commended)

About the winning entry:

Impressive examples of innovation proposed to LBi/bigmouthmedia clients including the use of QR codes, the launch of V-commerce activities, a 3D room designer application and Facebook's Open Graph API.

Most Innovative New Technology

• SapientNitro (WINNER)

• Fontdeck (Highly Commended)

• LOVEFiLM UK Ltd (Highly Commended)

About the winning entry:

The world's first smile-activated ice cream vending machine created for Unilever offered an exciting new way for consumers to buy Wall's ice cream and to experience the brand. The "Share Happy" vending machine combines facial recognition, 3G technology and social media.

Most Innovative Online Advertising Campaign

• Hiscox (WINNER)

• Cisco (Highly Commended)

• Essence (Highly Commended)

About the winning entry:

Hiscox partnered with a location-based wi-fi network to serve customers with targeted insurance adverts as they wait for a connection, Targeting was concentrated on those hotspots regularly used by prospects on the move, such as hotels, coffee shops and airports. In comparison to traditional display advertising, Hiscox achieved above average click-through rates and higher recall levels.

Most Innovative Use of Data

• Netflights (WINNER)

• Barclays Bank PLC (Highly Commended)

• Monetate, Inc. (Highly Commended)

About the winning entry:

Use of Tealeaf technology has given netflights.com complete visibility into how customers are behaving on its website. Customer journey insights are passed on to the contact centre so that agents can proactively help customers that are in need of assistance. Using Tealeaf, the outbound call centre team now delivers more revenue per hour than any other part of the business and generates over 26% of all revenue received through netflights.com.

Innovation Awards

http://econsultancy.com/awards

2010 Innovation Awards shortlist

http://econsultancy.com/awards/shortlist

2010 Innovation Awards winners

http://econsultancy.com/uk/awards/winners

Media contacts:

Christopher Hipson, Marketing Executive, Econsultancy 
(e: christopher.hipson AT econsultancy.com t: + 44 (0) 207 269 1451)

Linus Gregoriadis, Research Director, Econsultancy 
(e: linus AT econsultancy.com t: + 44 (0) 207 269 1450)

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