Asos drives £5m sales with Cannes Lions winning campaign

Friday, 21 June 2013

Online fashion retailer Asos has won a Media Lion in Cannes this week for its global digital Christmas campaign. Using the #BestNightEver hashtag, the campaign helped drive more than £5m worth of sales.

Featuring singers Ellie Goulding (@elliegoulding) and Azelia Banks (@Azealiabanks) and model Charlotte Free (@Charlotte_free), the campaign was designed to help generate big seasonal sales and grow the brand in new markets without requiring a big budget.

The celebs involved in the campaign all used their own social channels and networks to promote the videos and Asos offered fans the chance to win the clothes they were wearing.

Asos featured the stars in a series of videos that used shoppable technology, which showed off the brand’s Christmas products. As the videos were seen on the web and mobile devices, shoppers could click and buy the clothes they saw directly.

The in-house created campaign used social media throughout as it seeded videos and drove it all forward with #BestNightEver. In the process it achieved strong levels of engagement on Twitter and racked up thousands of @Asos handle and hashtag mentions.

The campaign was a huge success for Asos and drove more than £5m worth of sales in the US and UK. In the UK, the campaign helped the brand register its highest ROI to date while in the US searches for Asos soared by more than 50%.

Other great uses of Twitter at Cannes Lions 2013

As well as Asos plenty of other Cannes Lions winners and great entries have used Twitter this year.

Learn to speak English with Twitter

Red Balloon, an English language school for kids in Brazil, won a Gold Lion for Best use of social media marketing in a promotional campaign for its ‘Celeb Grammar Cops’ campaign. It had kids replying to their idols and pointing out their English language grammatical errors.

Live Tweets in a magazine

The US TV network The CW was entered for “Twitter in Print” for its innovative campaign to introduce its autumn programming line-up with the first-ever live Twitter feed in a magazine. It added 3G data chips to thin digital video screens and was able to pull in a live feed of tweets from The CW to the printed pages of magazines.

A game of football played out on Twitter

ESPN, a Media Lion entry for best use of social media, created Twitterball for people to participate on Twitter during halftime in the Real Madrid versus Borussia Dortmund Champion’s League game. It attracted 75,000+ people to play. The project went so well that it will be used again in the FIFA World Cup Brazil 2014.

Tesco pull a cracker

Not a winner, but a noteworthy campaign from British retail giant Tesco, which scored great results in the Christmas period. This was Tesco’s most successful Twitter campaign ever; the #PullACracker hashtag received 171,000 mentions, which was 66% of total Tesco Christmas volume.

Dutch film festival

The 2012 Dutch Film Festival made the audience the director in a Twitter-controlled live feature film with the best Dutch film actors taking part in ‘Under Control’. It scored a worldwide trending topic and saw more than one Tweet per second throughout a 90-minute live feature.

Previous great uses of Twitter at Cannes Lions

As well as these campaigns from this year’s festival, Cannes Lions has highlighted campaigns from previous years that have all used Twitter to great effect. See some of the other winners from this year’s festival on the Cannes Lions website.