BIA/Kelsey announced the winners of the 2015 GOLOCAL Awards on Friday morning, the closing day of BIA/Kelsey NATIONAL. The awards recognize successful local marketing initiatives deployed by national brands. Sightly, PowerChord and G/O Digital captured the wins with their respective projects:

• “Lead Generation & Social Audience Engagement” [.mov] — G/O Digital
• “PowerChord STIHL Southeast First Watch YouTube” — PowerChord on behalf of STIHL
• “Local Video Ad Campaigns Deliver Results for Wendy’s” — Sightly

“Congratulations to our GOLOCAL winners, who have demonstrated strategic, innovative and results-driven approaches to national-local marketing,” said MacKenzie Lovings, VP of marketing, BIA/Kelsey. “The campaigns showcase how to make national spending on local marketing efficient and targeted. We learned so much from all the companies who entered and shared their case studies. We also thank our esteemed panel of judges for their time and expertise.”

The criteria judges applied in making the selections were the ability to make national spending on local more efficient and targeted, campaigns that drove  national-local messages with innovative technologies and services, and projects that delivered national-local sales success for the client.

G/O Digital Lead Generation and Social Audience Engagement. Welding and HVAC repair students were recruited for StrataTech, a trade learning company in G/O Digital’s campaign. “The key goal in social is making the connection,” said Marty McDonald, director of strategic accounts at G/O, a Gannett Company. “We immersed ourselves in their business and understanding what that student looks like at each stage of the process.”

The project provided targeting of students further along in the social engagement rather than just driving top-line traffic. This resuled in 3,500 quality leads and 300 enrollments in Q4, 2014. StrataTech reported that its return on the investment from the campaign grew from previous levels of approximately break-even to an 800 percent return based on G/O Digital’s approach. The training company increased new student revenue by $1.5 million in the quarter.

“G/O Digital leveraged locally-targeted paid and owned/earned content, distributed across multiple, integrated platforms, to deliver a truly strategic campaign for StrataTech, said Jed Williams, director of business development, Main Street Hub, and a judge for GOLOCAL. “The power of hyperlocal targeting is obvious in the use of distance optimization to generate qualified candidates. Ultimately, a campaign is assessed on its ability to create clear ROI that aligns with customer needs. Here, the surge in leads and enrollments that G/O Digital drove for its client demonstrates top performance.”

“Our multi-faceted program didn’t just rely on a single marketing tactic,” G/O Digital’s McDonald said after the awards program. “We leveraged paid search, retargeting, social content development and targeted Facebook ads to deliver the results the client needed — qualified lead volume and conversions into enrollments. And it helped StrataTech connect their schools and campuses to their student body in fresh, creative and personalized ways. It was a pure honor to be grouped together with some of the world’s biggest brands like Sears, Maytag and Shop Rite. To be mentioned alongside such brand heavyweights is an incredible feat in itself, not only for our client but for all of us at G/O Digital too.”

PowerChord’s STIHL YouTube First Watch campaign. “We had a goal to market a product within a business with 800 dealers in US,” said Chris Gatley, digital marketing strategist for PowerChord. The campaign, instead of focusing on retail locations, created a product relationship designed to drive customers to specific parts of the stores where Stihl chainsaws, leaf blowers and other SKUs are available. The program was tested with 800 dealers in the Southeast and, when a consumer clicked through from YouTube, connected the consumer directly to a retail store page.

“PowerChord, Inc. is grateful to be recognized by BIA/Kelsey for the STIHL YouTube FIrst Position Campaign last fall,” said Nikkie Vegenski, director of digital marketing at PowerChord. “As the digital agency partner for STIHL Inc. and STIHL Southeast, PowerChord is really proud of the local success and increased visibility earned for these individual, participating STIHL Dealers.”

PowerChord took advantage of Google’s First Position placement program, which provides targeting based on user location during a short pre-roll video advertisement. When a consumer clicked, they were presented a targeted landing page based on local retail sites that promote in-store deals. YouTube First Position drops a cookie on the YouTube viewer’s browser that allows remarketing of the STIHL offer across the Web. The messages consistently emphasized dealer relationship, making destinations of local retail outlets, instead connecting with STIHL directly. “We wanted to create a one-to-one connection with the brand and the stores,” Gatley said.

When opening a dealer page, the viewer sees the same video they saw on YouTube, displayed in the background to reinforce the brand message while a regional locater asks for the user’s ZIP Code to identify a specific nearby store. The campaign involved generating a microsite for each location with reviews and information about services available at the dealer location. The program drove 8.1 million impressions in three weeks across thee states targeting males, ages 30 to 54 years of age. During the campaign, 474,000 users engaged with the pre-roll ad or a remarketing ad for a cost of $0.14 cents per completed view and a total cost of $0.18 cents per engagement.

The program is planned to run again for some of the STIHL dealers regionally during 2015, and potentially nationally in 2016.

“Sightly’s Local Video Ad Campaigns Deliver Results for Wendy’s”. Sightly set out to improve audience targeting and boost response rates with its video campaign for for Wendy’s, the fast-food chain. “We worked with Wendy’s on location targeting,” said John McIntyre, Founder and CEO of Sightly. “We want to rid the world of annoying commercials by making them significantly more relevant and targeted.”

“It is a great honor to be recognized by BIA/Kelsey and its panel of expert digital marketing judges for the innovative work we did for Wendy’s,” John McIntyre said. “Our video ad platform is built for multi-local brands and their agencies, and these campaigns showed the kind of exceptional results we can drive through our powerful combination of dynamic ad personalization and audience micro-targeting, delivered across all screens at the local level.”

To accomplish the targeting, Sightly and Wendy’s blended demographic, geo-location, known consumer behaviors and a mobile-device strategy to augment commercial placements on major sports-related networks. “We’re employing a second-generation tool to leverage programmatic in order to reach micro-targets based on what they search for, what they watch, where they are,” McIntyre said. He explained that the program was able to deliver thousands of variations on the ads based on the audience profile. It was a pr0cess that took 17 months to develop prior to Sightly’s innovation, which reduced the ad customization process to less than four hours using programmatic elements to target on the fly.

Applying their understanding of consumer context in a sports enthusiast market, Sightly conducted a nine-day pilot, that produced double-digit increases in the number of views of Wendy’s ads. In nine days, ads in a single DMA produced 360,000 video views and 1,000 clicks on a $1-off coupon offer. A second test of six weeks in three DMAs resulted in 544,000 video views and 1,800 clicks on the $1-off coupon offer. Sightly and Wendy’s are now working to address segmentation by day part and has begun addressing football fans in each reagion with a personalized message, such as “Go Buckeyes” messages in Ohio State viewer areas.

This year’s judges for the GOLOCAL Awards included:

Teri Guill, President, Social Media Club Dallas
Asif R. Khan, Founder & President Location Based Marketing Association (LBMA)
Nancy Lane, President, Local Media Association (LMA)
Scott Vann, President, Dallas/Fort Worth Search Engine Marketing Association
Abhi Vyas, Vice President, Marketing, MetroMedia Technologies (Representing AMA Dallas Chapter)
Dave Walker, Co-Founder & CEO, bizHive.com
Jed Williams, Director of BD, MainStreetHub