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Hedgehog Hall of Fame: Confused.com - Driving in High Heels (Consumer PR)

Company: Confused.com Campaign: Driving in High Heels Category: Consumer PR Campaign of the Year - South - Shortlisted Objective We wanted to devise a campaign to achieve the following: • Share important key messages around safer driving • To get consumers to understand the Confused.com brand • To get Confused.com to return to position two in car insurance on Google • Target women drivers in anticipation of the EU gender ruling. (In Dec 2012 women will cease to benefit from cheaper car insurance compared to male drivers.) • Offer an authoritative voice on road safety in partnership with Brake. Once we had developed our creative idea then we agreed on the following specific aims: • To create great content through social media, research and interaction. • To engage consumer interest and conversation around a serious subject. • To raise awareness of the dangers of driving in unsuitable footwear and encourage people to be more aware of driving safely. • Produce an engaging, shareable campaign to support the SEO position of Confused.com for car insurance through social signals, gaining links and video embeds. • Position Confused.com as the authoritative voice in car insurance and related motoring issues. Internal objectives: • Build new relationships with national online journalists. • Reach at least  four national media titles with this campaign (online coverage is always our priority). • Explore new, but relevant, social media platforms e.g. Pinterest and use the talents of our in-house social media experts to create shareable content. Target Audience  • The 2012 brief for PR and Marketing is to support the SEO positions of Confused.com, by gaining links to content and PR. • We also wanted to engage conversation with a new consumer audience that uses social media as an everyday tool. This was achieved through us adapting our messages so they were suitable for various platforms, using the correct language for the targeted audience. • In December 2012 a new EU law will mean that women, statistically lower risk drivers, will cease to benefit from cheaper car insurance compared to male drivers. We think this is unfair – if women are statistically safer drivers why should they miss out on savings? As such we are consciously prioritising women in our marketing and PR for 2012. • Another big influence was recent shocking statistics on road safety: 2011 saw the first annual increase in fatalities on British roads since 2003 (source: Department For Transport), with 940 deaths recorded during the first six months of 2011. This can’t be ignored: despite our cheeky and risqué approach to marketing, passenger safety is key to what we do and was central to this campaign. We brainstormed bad driving habits with many women admitting to driving in high heels. We spoke to experts, road safety charity Brake, and our car insurance experts who said we should stop wearing stilettos behind the wheel. Research among 2,000 drivers proved our hypothesis: 40 per cent of women have worn high heels when driving. Our in-house social media experts saw the potential of video, photos and social interaction for sharing the findings and the safety messages. They recommended a relatively new platform, Pinterest where 68.2 per cent (source: Mashable) of users are women - perfect for our female-focused campaign. Action • We planned to alert drivers to the dangers of unsuitable footwear without 'preaching'. As an incentive, we successfully sourced several pairs of safe driving footwear, which included Butterfly Twists ballet pumps and some Vans trainers. These were offered as competition prizes via our own e-newsletter and our growing social media channels. • We made an amusing short film in-house showing a woman being ‘checked out’ as she strutted through Cardiff City Centre in skyscraper heels, only to stall – literally – when she gets into her car and tries to drive away, immediately losing the respect of her admirers. The call-to-action for women was to follow us on Pinterest and enter the competition by sharing photos of their most extravagant high heeled shoes for the chance to win more practical driving footwear. Tools used to spread the message included: - Omnibus research - Press release/phonecalls to media - Facebook - Twitter - Pinterest - Youtube - Video-onsite - Onsite content - Email - Competition/giveaway - Infographic - Pictures - Radio (earned) Results We achieved our aim of being a respected commentator on road safety, by working with Brake, who we now have an excellent relationship with. Importantly we achieved our business objective of returning to position two for car insurance on Google - phew! We achieved clear engagement with the general public, as visits to Confused.com via articles about driving in heels totalled, 46,064 with 144 comments and 375 shares on one article. More than 65 per cent of visitors were new, so our message reached a new audience plus our existing audience. Our experimentation with Pinterest paid off, raising the campaign above the level of a simple and traditional PR survey, by making it fully social and multimedia – our campaign has been compared with some of the best social campaigns worldwide, including Barack Obama and Gap. • We secured 83 pieces of media coverage including The Sun, Daily Express, Daily Star, Metro, Daily Mail online, Sky News Radio (including Magic FM) and several BBC radio stations • We saw a 33.6 per cent uplift in Facebook fans. • More than 1,500 people tweeted about the campaign. • The driving in heels video: now watched over 60,000 times. • Between 5 April and 1 May 2012 the Confused.com YouTube channel had 51,926 views, compared with 6,739 in the same period last year. The channel gained 15 subscribers, 97 likes and 24 shares (YouTube). • We achieved 13 links, 21 video embeds, and over 100 inbound links from other sites to the infographic. Estimated value of buying these links and embeds = £18,000 (as evaluated by SEO agency bigmouth). We do not buy links as we do not believe it is an ethical thing to do: we favour ‘earned media’ rather than ‘paid-for media’. • We managed to bring the campaign in under budget. However the results far exceeded our target and many other metrics. • Our low-cost campaign punched above its weight with results and praise garnered  not only in the UK but also worldwide (Australia, America). URLs Examples of press coverage: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2117575/No-high-heels-wheel-Experts-ban-wearing-hazardous-stilettos-driving.html http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/309208/Stop-driving-in-heels-girls http://mashable.com/2012/04/13/pinterest-contest-driving-in-heels http://www.marketingmag.com.au/news/top10-uses-of-pinterest-by-brands-12590/#.UJunfoV3ZPs The PRmoment Golden Hedgehog Awards 2014 are now open for entries. Here are this years updated categories.

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