Examining a Gem of a Campaign

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Ogilvy winner JWT shares research strategies from the Journey Diamonds launch.

What separates good advertising campaigns from great ones? Often, it’s the research underlying them. That’s the premise behind the ARF’s annual Ogilvy Awards. They celebrate legend David Ogilvy’s advocacy of research as a tool to make good advertising better.

In a new series of articles, the ARF speaks with Ogilvy award winners to learn more about the most successful research techniques their campaigns used. For insight into “With Every Step Love Grows,” winner of the best new product launch category, we spoke with JWT’s David Sisson, director of market intelligence and Colby Shergalis, core program director. JWT created the campaign for Diamond Trading Co., a leading diamond sales and marketing company with a worldwide presence.

The background:
JWT’s campaign for Diamond Trading, based around “the perfect romance” theme, produced growing sales for years among the 50,000 jewelers who sell the diamonds. But by 2005, purchases started leveling off.

The goal
JWT looked for a new advertising concept that would increase holiday diamond jewelry sales by $100 million for the 2006-7 season.

Research highlights
JWT decided to break away from its traditional methods, which relied heavily on one of the largest panels gathering data on luxury product acquisition. “We realized we needed to get out of the category a little bit and put aside a little bit of the information we knew about diamonds,” says David. “It clouded our ability to listen to consumers talk about the category and, really, about their relationships.”

Starting in 2005, JWT recruited panelists willing to host groups of friends and neighbors at their homes to play parlor games, such as Taboo, and talk about their relationships. Questions ranged from the straightforward (“What do you envision celebrating with your spouse in five years?”) to the fanciful (“If you were an animal what would you be? If your spouse was an animal what would he be? How do those relate to each other?”) “I could have opened my own couples counseling center afterward,” jokes David. “We got a better sense for how couples are communicating and what they need from their partner.”

Couples saw challenges in their lives as something that brought them closer. Colby noted that “It’s the ups and downs that make your love go stronger. ” The feedback helped JWT develop a new product idea - a graduated series of diamonds that reflected the evolution of a couple’s relationship over time.

For ideas on how best to represent the concept, JWT assembled another set of panelists, many of whom had artistic interests. The agency asked them to create items such as decorative T-shirts to sculptures that showed the concept of love growing stronger over time. Informed by that research, JWT and its client began working with jewelry designers immediately afterward to create the Journey Diamonds product line.

The campaign
JWT released the concept of Journey Diamond Jewelry in print ads in August 2006, following them with separate TV commercials aimed at men and women. A 30-second holiday-season spot, for instance, focused on a man who couldn’t wait to give his wife a Journey Diamond pendant he had been hiding – and slipped it on her neck as she slept. “When you’re talking relationships, a lot of things happen in very quiet moments,” notes David.

The result
Incremental diamond jewelry sales increased by $363 million during the 2006 holiday season, according to JWT. By the third quarter of 2007, Journey sales had increased by more than $1.3 billion, exceeding the campaign’s goal of increasing sales by $1 billion for that year. “Journey is now a $2 billion category,” says David. The fact that Journey Diamonds didn’t exist before the campaign makes this evidence of the power of creative research even more compelling.

The ARF will accept entries for this year’s awards until the Dec. 16 deadline. The awards ceremony will be held on March 31 in New York City.
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