Top Gear: Useful Internet Marketing Strategies & Tips to Move You Forward: Here are the 2018 Markie Award Finalists

We are excited to announce the Markie Award finalists for 2018! This year marks the 12th year that we have celebrated the best in Modern Marketing. We were pleased to invite Oracle Commerce customers to submit for a Markie Award and they proved that great marketing can be done with Oracle Commerce products, too!

A lot goes into great marketing - from leveraging data for insights, to creating personalized messages and reaching target audiences through multiple channels. The Markies submissions reflect the changing nature of marketing and the fact that our customers are demanding better customer experiences in exchange for brand advocacy and loyalty.

Thank you to everyone who submitted and shared their inspiring stories with us. Our judges enjoyed reading through them all. The caliber of the submissions showed just how savvy our Oracle Marketing Cloud and Oracle Commerce customers are when it comes to Modern Marketing. Congratulations to our finalists!

Winners will be announced at the Markie Awards dinner ceremony at Modern Customer Experience in Chicago on April 10th at 8 PM. All attendees to the event are welcome to attend and celebrate with us.

And now…the finalists!

Account-Based Marketing Team of the Year

These teams have embraced an end-to-end view across the entire buyer journey and across all channels. They know their buyer profile, have created targeted campaigns that drive engagement and ROI and have created visibility into which accounts have the greatest propensity to buy.

This year’s finalists achieved phenomenal results with their account-based marketing strategies. With focused, methodical and well-executed campaigns, these organizations were able to increase open rates, build pipeline and tightened the overall experience, providing seamless touchpoints for their target audiences. At the same time, they were also able to create cross-functional relationships within their organizations.

Cisco
Clarivate Analytics
DX Marketing
NEC
NTT Communications Corporation

Best B2B Commerce Experience

These data-driven Modern Commerce or Marketing professionals have proven ways to deliver personalized buying experiences for every B2B customer. They have provided their customers with relevant content, merchandising, personalized search, customized marketing programs, and tailored websites across all channels. At the same time, they enable self-service with custom catalogs, custom pricing and account-specific experiences.

The finalists below are delivering integrated experiences, streamlining processes and providing seamless commerce experiences for their B2B customers. Some have even mastered B2C-like experiences for their B2B audience and increased their conversion rate in the process.

Calix
Dubai World Trade Center
Integra Life Sciences
The Chefs Warehouse
WestRock

Best B2C Commerce Experience

These data-driven Modern Commerce or Marketing professionals are delivering personalized buying experiences for every B2C customer, connecting the online experience to the in-store experience by exposing inventory availability and offering click and collect. This award recognizes the supremely enlightened organization that truly gets the power of personally engaging consistently delightful, and seamlessly integrated experiences where the customer runs the show.

These finalists have created strategies to align and unify their brands, designed beautiful visual selling websites, leveraged mobile in engaging and easy-to-use ways and provide a variety of their users with targeted experiences.

Ascena Retail Group
Moleskine
PureFormulas
Public Broadcasting Service Distribution
Vermont Country Store

Best Digital Marketing Ecosystem

These organizations are taking advantage of digital marketing integration to enhance processes or improve analytics. They have created an integrated ecosystem with CRM, third-party cloud apps, or other applications to automate, streamline, and enhance your marketing efforts and are often using APIs in interesting ways.

This year’s finalists show how integrating with either multiple Oracle products or other third party products to build their marketing stack can help improve efficiencies and significantly increase revenue, sales opportunities and customer interactions.

ADP
Atea
Infosys
Jetstar
Vodafone Group Enterprise

Best Email Marketing Campaign

Email can be extraordinary. In fact, there are some email communications that are so well written, so masterfully designed, that it's only a question of when people will respond, not if. Achieving extraordinary response rates isn't luck – it's the result of great targeting, content, personalization and timing.

These finalists show just how extraordinary email can be. They were able to personalize emails for their target market, adopt A/B testing, analyzed their data to make customer experience the forefront of the campaigns that ultimately, drove revenue contribution.

Aer Lingus
Certiport
Olav Thon Gruppen
Tech Mahindra Limited
Wine (Dia da Saudade)

Best Emerging Company Marketing Campaign

Doing more with less? These fast-growing, emerging companies of $100M in revenue or less have lean, mean, marketing teams that have executed masterful marketing campaigns using marketing automation to do the work of ten people.

This year’s nominees proved that size doesn’t matter. They were able to create targeted customer experiences with clear objectives, organizational alignment and collaboration across different departments.

E-commerce Enablers Pte ltd /Shopback
Mist Systems
Second City Works
TurnKey Vacation Rentals

Best Integrated Mobile Experience

For these organizations, mobile is the platform of choice for the majority of their ideal customers. As such they have created personalized experiences with messages and promotions optimized for mobile.

These finalists have adopted a customer centric approach to their mobile experience, developed creative and modern looking responsive designs and designed mobile apps to connect online and offline data for complete end-to-end experiences.

Moleskine
Mountain America Credit Union
Public Broadcasting Service Distribution
The Vitamin Shoppe
Vermont Country Store

Best International Campaign

The Best International Campaign award will go to a company with a successful marketing campaign outside the United States - in multiple countries in multiple languages, modification of a program originally created in the U.S. and re-launched in another country, or any variation in between.

The finalists this year truly built international campaigns by incorporating multiple campaign canvases designed for multiple languages across multiple countries, resulting in impressive ROI and pipeline revenue.

American Express
HCL Technologies Ltd
LATAM Airlines
Morningstar
Philips Lighting

Best Lead Management Program

Finalists in this category have a sophisticated lead management program that delivered measurable results. They demonstrate the use of lead scoring and deliver compelling results. In this award, people, process and technology all come into play.

The 2018 Finalists in this category managed to coordinate leads across complex enterprises and multiple campaigns, creating alignment between sales and marketing and increasing revenue and pipeline at the same time.

Basware OYJ
Covance Inc
HCL Technologies Ltd
Saison Information Systems Co., Ltd
Samsung Electronics France

Best Omni-Channel Marketing Program

Finalists in this category create personalized experiences with messages and promotions across web, social, mobile, email, display, or other digital channels to attract or retain their ideal customers?

This year’s finalists are leveraging multiple Oracle products, leveraging all channels to build complex marketing programs that result in uplift rates, cost savings and improved customer experience.

Aon
Lojas Renner
Medtronic
National Roads and Motorists' Association Limited

Best Overall Customer Experience

Every company says they are customer focused. But few actually deliver. These finalists have created a customer retention or loyalty program that has successfully transformed their customers into fiercely loyal brand advocates. They have shifted their culture from consumer transactions to customer relationships to drive loyalty.

The following finalists are making the digital shift and personalized their customer journeys using various technologies and integrated data, often connecting their customers offline and online resulting in increased customer retention, sales and conversion rates.

Axcess Financial (Check n Go)
Cisco
Schibsted Media
Vermont Country Store
Visma Software Oy - Tutka

Best Social Campaign

For finalists in this category, Social Media is more than just a buzz word. They have found creative ways to utilize both new and traditional social mediums in order to build sustained dialogs with customers and prospects, and have seized the opportunities available through social media to generate proven results.

These finalists incorporated social media in innovative ways to promote their product, generate leads and drive results. They used visually appealing creative, leveraged influencers and put customer experience at the forefront of their campaigns.

Axcess Financial (Check n Go)
Bajaj Finserv
Sage
Technos
Texas Instruments

Best Testing and Optimization

These Marketers have optimized the online customer experience with testing, insights, and personalization. They have maximized revenue potential across web, mobile, social, apps, and other digital channels as a result and have taken the leap to multivariate sophistication. Nominees for this award have incorporated testing and optimization of their campaigns and programs to mitigate risk, drive better decisions, increase revenue, and improve the customer experience.

The finalists in this category took testing to a whole other level by starting out with testing theories before implementing, as well as testing across different country sites. They analyzed and optimized personalized content on the web, resulting in significant revenue increases.

American Express
Etihad Airways
Hilton
HTC
Signet Jewelers

Best Use of Data

The data-driven Modern Marketer targets and engages their ideal audience for specific business initiatives These finalists are successfully using data to target, personalize, measure and win. They are using data in innovative and strategic ways, and have seen their efforts pay off with improved customer experiences and ROI.

This year’s finalists used data science and predictive modeling to uncover segments and opportunity with a great realization and achievements. They used different data sources to lower costs of acquisition and created highly targeted campaigns using a strong mix of implicit and explicit data points.

Jones Lang LaSalle Property Consultant Pte Ltd
LTI (Larson Tourbro Infotech)
Passarela
REA Group
Samsung Business America

Best Use of Insights and ROI

These Marketers are interpreting data for actionable recommendations that improve business results and customer experience. This award recognizes an organization that has moved beyond reporting (old methods of organizing data into informational summaries to monitor performance) towards analysis (new data and meaningful insights that improve performance).

These finalists used analytics and data science to proactively engage customers throughout the entire relationship lifecycle with personalized and optimized communications; establish enterprise-wide reporting strategies to create complete and actionable stories and determine ROI from campaigns to justify additional development of campaigns within their organizations.

Cisco
Covance Inc.
Hitachi Consulting
La-Z-Boy
Morningstar

Modern Marketing Leader of the Year

Just as great people are the foundation for successful businesses, innovators are often the driving force behind exceptional marketing. These nominees are the passionate senior people that push their teams to succeed, lead decisive change, set the vision for the entire marketing organization and introduce innovative concepts.

This year’s submissions demonstrated impressive and inspiring leaders who are taking their marketing to the next level by aligning changing business environments with consumer behavior and bringing a “digital-first” vision into the organization. They have broken down silos and implemented ground-breaking marketing and testing new technologies.

Brightcove - Chris Bondhus
FIS - Alisa Barber
Pirelli - David Alemani
Sage - Kevin Cassidy
Stein IAS - Marc Keating

Most Creative Marketing Campaign

Sometimes all of the pieces align to create a fantastic marketing campaign – the perfect idea, the right target, the memorable artwork, the personalized follow-up, and of course, the measurable results.

These finalists have innovatively used segmentation and gamification to both educate and nurture their customers, increase interest in their product and leveraged celebrity to increase activity across multiple channels.

Cisco
Desert Financial Credit Union
Eaton
FIS
Texas Instruments

Rapid Transformation

Enabling a high-performance marketing culture isn’t always easy. For most organizations, it can take time to master the intricate blend of messaging, segmentation, data orchestration, organizational alignment and other disciplines. The Rapid Transformation award honors those who have successfully implemented any Oracle Marketing Cloud technology in the past year, for their superb planning, execution, and results.

Within their first year, these finalists were able to both rapidly transformed their marketing and their corporate culture, successfully implement more than one marketing technology and use data analytics to drive their campaigns.

Banco Votorantim
BMW New Zealand
Carlson Wagonlit Travel
Movember
Pirelli

People's Choice Award: Best Video Submission

This award honors the best video submission with a people’s choice award voted on by your peers. Finalists in this category submitted exceptional videos enhanced by creativity, humor or human interest touches.