On Wednesday, GumGum, an artificial intelligence company, with deep expertise in computer vision, was awarded two prestigious Performance Marketing awards at the 2018 Performance Marketing Awards ceremony. The company received recognition for the Most Creative Performance Marketing Campaign and Best Technology and Telecoms Campaign for their partnership with Vodafone and Wavemaker.
Playing to Apple's notoriously tight iPhone X brand restrictions, GumGum partnered with Vodafone and Wavemaker to prove that getting creative is the best way to get ahead of the competition. GumGum used sophisticated image recognition technology to target millions of iPhone images online and overlay them with Vodafone's brand message; telling consumers that they had the latest smartphone, without ever mentioning the device itself.
This strategy allowed Vodafone to own all iPhone editorial content, in complete isolation from their competitors, enabling them to achieve brand stand out like never before - and more importantly to drive record-breaking sales.
This same campaign stood out to the judges amongst fierce competition within the tech and telecoms sector. The judges felt that clear objectives and innovative use of image-recognition technology led to brilliant results - with Vodafone achieving its fastest-ever morning of pre-order sales.
"Together with Wavemaker we formulated an outstanding forward-thinking strategy which utilized our computer visioning technology and ensured Vodafone was front of mind during the launch of the new iPhone, without ever mentioning it. The intelligent use of our image recognition technology enabled us to surface the most relevant images and articles across our premium publisher partners, and without mentioning iPhone we were able to operate outside of the Apple restrictions, whilst placing Vodafone within the vast amount of publisher content relating to the launch. This hyper-targeted campaign met and exceeded all the objectives set by WaveMaker as the campaign represented a fantastic use case of our technology that far exceeded industry benchmarks for engagement and viewability." Ed Preedy, Managing Director, GumGum, Europe
