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Space & Time has used the following skills/services in the project.
Manchester Arndale is the biggest inner-city shopping centre in the country, bringing the best of Manchester shopping, food, drink and entertainment together under one roof in the heart of the city.
The Challenge
Manchester Arndale were looking to appoint an agency with the ability to deliver agile local marketing plans, designed to maintain and develop the brand image, whilst remaining competitive with other centres in the North West.
The current 3-year marketing strategy focused on ‘preaching to the unconverted’ and addressing the barriers to visit from infrequent and lapsed shoppers.
A key challenge raised was the lack of free parking available for visitors, so a strong need to focus on the accessibility from public transport, and the key USP of being centrally located within Manchester City Centre.
Our Solution
Once appointed, our initial response related to Spring Summer activity for 2020.
As part of this campaign planning, our Research team were tasked with profiling the key audiences and locations. Based on our research, it was evident a channel mix including social media, and a variety of video channels were required to best tailor a solution to our audience.
Across social media, our research indicated an audience bias towards Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat – on this basis, our in house team tailored solutions to achieve best value in these spaces.
Based on the campaign budget, we sourced competitive proposals from a range of different TV Groups, with a focus on VOD campaigns, given their over index against our core target audience.
Based on this research, evidence proved a mix of ITV and Channel 4 VOD activity, supported by YouTube activity via our in house Paid Search team, was the best way of achieving a high degree of reach and frequency against this audience.
Social and BVOD activity was supported by our in house programmatic team, with a targeted display campaign utilised to enhance reach amongst the key audience using a mix of rich media and video assets.
Interestingly, we also included Cinema advertising in our channel planning to provide additional reach into our target market.
When COVID-19 disrupted Spring / Summer plans for 2020, we were able to respond quickly, removing Cinema advertising from the plan, and adapting the run dates in our overall media plan to move activity from Spring/Summer to September – December in line with changing lockdown criteria, to ensure our media plan was delivered at the best possible time to achieve footfall for the center.
Space & Time were ideally placed to manage this campaign, with a 30 strong team with boots on the ground in Manchester with first-hand knowledge of the local geography and considerations, as well as our in-house Research, Social Media and Google Paid Search expertise to draw on.
Manchester Arndale were eager to work with Space & Time given our personal service approach to their campaign, as well as our collaborative approach with key partner agencies already in place within the wider Manchester Arndale team.
The Results
Our programmatic display activity delivered over a million ad impressions total in the campaign period, with 7,500 clicks to the Manchester Arndale website.
13.8% increase in gift card page views throughout the campaign period.
In December, our targeted Snapchat activity delivered over 20,000 video views of the campaign creative at a cost per view of £0.07.
