These Innovative Campaigns and Execs Delivered Results and Accountability When It Mattered Most

The demand for consumer-packaged goods in the wake of Covid-19 continues to upend the regular patterns that connect commerce and performance.

From March 2020 through February 2021, both in-store and online CPG sales rose 14% compared to the previous 12-month period, according to data from NCSolutions.

But with new opportunities come new challenges, and Marc Pritchard, Procter & Gamble’s chief brand officer, led the company’s push to add more performance marketing into the advertising mix while navigating the tumult that was 2020. By dint of that stewardship, Pritchard is Adweek’s Performance Marketer of the Year.

While Pritchard has spent his entire four-decade career with the 183-year-old company, he has consistently pursued reinvention through a concept he calls “lead constructive disruption.” The idea, which is premised on the practical use of data and tech as opposed to innovation only meant to dazzle the industry, has animated Pritchard’s approach to Big Data and economic modeling. And it’s been particularly key as predictable consumer purchase patterns were rendered unreliable in 2020. It has also dictated the way P&G has embraced purpose-driven marketing efforts to better engage and connect with its customers and match their values.

Check out our profile on Pritchard here.

The first thing most people notice about Jennifer Lopez is her name. And while Lopez isn’t the actor and singer who performed at President Joe Biden’s inauguration, she is a celebrity in her own right in the marketing community. Lopez, vice president of product development at Capital One, is Adweek’s 2021 Performance Marketer of the Year, Rising Star because she embodies everything required of a Marketer of the Year while still being rather fresh to the field.

In fact, Lopez had just started working on her master’s degree in human-centered design and innovation at Stanford University when Pegg Nadler, who nominated Lopez for the award, became Target Marketing magazine’s 2009 Direct Marketer of the Year.

“Her programs focus on combining innovation with data analysis—marketing ideas backed by hard-core numbers and performance results,” Nadler says of Lopez. “Jennifer is only at the beginning of her career, but all those who have watched her know that she will be a major influencer in years to come in the financial, technology and product design arenas.”

Nadler points to two notable projects Lopez spearheaded: Project Elements and ReadySetBank.org. The former was a credit card from Capital One—unbranded, far from rectangular and so personalized to the financial institution’s young customers that only the user’s signature revealed it was a credit card. While Capital One presented the Project Elements card at South by Southwest in 2017, the cards made of bamboo, copper and other materials didn’t make it to market because they were too hard to manufacture. 

“Learning and resilience is a key part of an innovative culture,” Lopez says. “Shutting down ideas that don’t work is an organic—and important—part of the innovation process. In our lab, we look at hundreds of ideas annually and then shut down 95% to 97% of them. We’re letting go of those things that don’t work to find that which matters.”

Next, Lopez helped redesign a website Capital One created to educate senior citizens about online banking tools. ReadySetBank.org averaged 3,624 monthly views in 2019; in April 2020, a month into government-mandated lockdowns, views rose to 19,829.

“The virtual pivot that our team and [their] team made on the Ready Set Bank program has been, in our opinion, phenomenal,” says Vivian Nava-Schellinger, director of community partnerships at the National Council on Aging. “It is a testament to the way to empower older adults in communities with similarities and stark differences.”

Becoming Capital One’s youngest vp in July 2019 and now serving as head of the innovation lab, Lopez was recently honored for tech leadership by the Hispanic Information Technology Executive Council as part of its 2021 HITEC 100.

In May 2020, more than 1.4 million viewers of a six-hour live show got a chance to celebrate their graduations about three times longer than they would have during an average in-person ceremony. Visitors to imstillgraduating.com added their names and high schools or colleges, creating a 44-page yearbook sponsored by Neutrogena.

Attendees following the campaign hashtag #ImStillGraduating could find the streaming show on TikTok, Twitter and Instagram. Some followed the content marketing efforts elsewhere, including on the owned media at HerCampus.com and earned media in outlets such as The New York Times, CNN, Us Weekly, Billboard and the Hollywood Reporter. Attendees from more than 1,000 college campuses viewed the concurrently streaming show on sites including ImStillGraduating.com, HerCampus.com, SpoonUniversity.com and CollegeFashionista.com as well as social platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Twitch and YouTube.

In all, the campaign saw 1.6 billion press impressions, a 92 million reach from graduation speakers’ social posts, trended in Twitter’s Top 10 in the U.S. and had 9.3 million campaign impressions, says Windsor Hanger Western, co-founder, publisher and president of Her Campus Media.

“In 2020, we worked very hard to create content and virtual experiential solutions for college students whose college experience had been turned upside down,” Western says. “We were the first group to announce a virtual graduation ceremony in 2020.” 

Western and the Her Campus Media team found commencement event sponsors—Aussie Hair Care (P&G), Neutrogena (J&J), First Aid Beauty, just. periods, Plan B One-Step, truth, Sallie Mae, Pandora Jewelry, Hallmark, Tasty Bite, Conair, GoDaddy, Minted and Lilly Pulitzer. And with the help of Sunshine Sachs, they pulled in presenters, like former One Direction singer Liam Payne, the Jonas Brothers, Vanity Fair editor Radhika Jones, actor Eva Longoria, CNN anchor Brooke Baldwin and comedian Margaret Cho, among many others.

Her Campus Media created content that got soon-to-be graduates and their families excited about watching the show. Advice including “How to: Take the Best Grad Photos” and “How to: DIY Your Grad Cap” still lives on HerCampus.com below the social and email sharing widget about #ImStillGraduating. 

“It was our first large-scale virtual event and was put together in just six weeks,” Western says. But it won’t be the last; the next show is slated for May 2021.

Zoom didn’t just enter our lives in a big way during 2020—it entered our lexicon.

Although Americans didn’t start working from home en masse until mid-March, Zoom meetings became so ubiquitous during the pandemic that the editors at Oxford Languages couldn’t decide between “Zoom fatigue” and “Blursday,” among others, for its word of the year. Now there’s even a Yiddish word for the exhaustion: “Oysgezoomt.” 

On Dec. 1, 2020, the video conferencing software platform reported a 485% year-over-year increase in customers with more than 10 employees on the app. And in February 2021, a Zoom spokesman told Adweek that more than 300 million free and paid platform daily meeting participants had used Zoom since April 2020.

“We love that so many people are finding Zoom to be an easy way to stay connected in this time of social distancing, school closures and work-from-home routines,” says Priscilla McCarthy Barolo, Zoom’s head of communications. 

But it isn’t just Zoom’s ballooning popularity that earns it the award of Performance Marketing Platform of the Year; it’s that it achieves measurable results. So much so that performance marketers are replacing their in-person trade shows with Zoom webinars in order to generate leads. According to Zoom, the webinar platform can host up to 10,000 view-only attendees “and in special cases, upon request, we can accommodate events the size of 30,000-50,000 [people].”

Webinar registrations create opt-in data performance marketers can use to email targeted content to desirable leads, and Zoom’s case studies show that its customers do just that and are happy with the results.

According to Zoom, 2021 will include recently released, enhanced webinar capabilities, including native post-webinar surveys, enhanced scheduling options and Q&A features to improve engagement with attendees.

“Many of these new features have been instrumental for organizations that used Zoom Video Webinars for virtual events large and small this year—from the NBA and WNBA to our own Zoomtopia user conference,” according to Zoom’s 2020 in review blog post.

It makes sense that a company that wants to be known for tech, not just electronics, would value data in its marketing, but Best Buy seems to be morphing the entire retail behemoth—including its operating model—based on what the data says will work for customers. For instance, Best Buy flipped all of its stores to curbside delivery within 48 hours of making the decision to do so in mid-March, according to the company. (It even did so where not required.) According to CEO Corie Barry, that quick change resulted in a year-over-year retention of 70% of customers from March 21 to April 11, 2020, a period during which many businesses retained significantly fewer. “Our teams delivered strong results and materially advanced our strategy in fiscal 2020,” Barry says. “That was only made possible by meeting our customers when and where they want.” By paying attention to the data, Best Buy’s U.S. revenue grew 21% to $10.85 billion during the quarter ending in November 2020 compared to the same quarter in 2019. That included a 174% increase in online sales, which account for 35% of the company’s domestic revenue total.

Burberry’s “Festive” film portrays the luxury brand as relevant to a crowd with which it’s not typically associated—the young. But beyond that, it’s about a diverse future, and the brand is relevant there, too. Below the video portraying Burberry-clad artists happily dancing in frozen precipitation, Burberry’s chief creative officer Riccardo Tisci writes: “It’s about that fearless spirit and imagination when pushing boundaries.”​ Burberry’s film is part of the “Voices of Tomorrow” campaign and was created and directed by Megaforce through Riff Raff Films (acting as both production company and creative agency). The video autoplayed in banner ads on the homepage of The New York Times and all over social media. By March, the film had 3.4 million views on YouTube, with 7,600 likes and 320 comments. For the overall “Voices” campaign, Burberry partnered with Manchester United player Marcus Rashford, who appeared in Instagram ads, a mural and more. “Burberry shared my vision in bettering local communities through investment into youth centers, which play a pivotal role in the childhood of many, especially in underprivileged areas,” Rashford says in Burberry’s announcement.

Who doesn’t want to live in Cheeselandia? The community created by the Dairy Farmers of Wisconsin is more a state of mind than a location, but only a lucky few can wedge their way in and become influencers, says Suzanne Fanning, the CMO for Wisconsin Cheese and the senior vice president of the Dairy Farmers of Wisconsin. That’s because these influencers must truly love cheese in order to join the community estimated to total 4,500 members by summer. “Pre-pandemic, many of them were having Wisconsin Cheese house parties with their friends, and they attended our brand pop-up events in major cities,” Fanning says. “During the pandemic, they longed to continue connecting, so we started having Zoom virtual events.” Influencers spoke about Swiss on Zoom, then chatted about cheddar on Instagram and LinkedIn. That helped the $44 billion Wisconsin dairy industry have one of its best years ever. Fanning says that in 2020, Wisconsin’s famous product moved to the first page of Google’s search results for “cheese,” up from a previous placement of No. 96. WisconsinCheese.com subsequently saw 1.7 million visitors, breaking a 20-year-old record. Fanning says overall cheese sales rose during the pandemic for all purveyors, but Wisconsin Specialty Cheese purchases outpaced the category.

On March 8 of this year, Deliveroo opened its IPO with a valuation of $7 billion, showing the world just how much of a banner year 2020 was for the food delivery service. While the restaurant industry lost hundreds of billions of dollars as a result of the pandemic, the delivery services with which it partnered—largely used via mobile apps—grew 8%. To try to keep its restaurant partners in business during 2020, Deliveroo started the #HereToDeliver campaign that alerted its social media followers that their favorite local eateries were still in business. “We’re here to deliver—so you can still support your local restaurants and takeaways during this difficult time,” read a 2020 tweet from Deliveroo about the closing of restaurants, bars and pubs in the U.K. “In 2020, we were able to focus on executing mobile strategies that really delivered incremental growth for Deliveroo,” says James Cordery, Deliveroo’s head of performance marketing strategy. On Feb. 22 of this year, with #HereToDeliver still above the fold on its website, Deliveroo had more than 10 million installs on Google Play, whereas the service had 6 million total customers at the end of 2018. It also rose to No. 2 in the Food and Drink category on the App Store, up from No. 3 as recently as Feb. 17.

What could be a more relevant product to market during a pandemic than content aimed at small-business owners seeking solutions? Enter the “Small Business Revolution” television series, hosted by Deluxe and streaming on Hulu, Amazon Prime and SBR.org. Agency Collective Measures tells Adweek it “deployed a full media mix of both awareness and traffic-driving tactics, which worked cohesively to drive episode views via view-through actions, and increased branded search volume.” The campaign drove brand awareness via channels ranging from billboards to YouTube ads, increasing watched episodes by 208% year over year. By targeting small-business owners and broader audiences, optimizing placements and unique messaging for each, the TV series that champions small businesses in small towns saw nearly 42 million video trailers viewed to completion, up 166% in 2020 compared with the previous year; over 288 million targeted impressions, resulting in a 144% increase; and 118,477 episode watches. The campaign also employed the Cheddar hosting platform, a data-driven approach to linear TV, and testing on LinkedIn and Facebook. “These results far exceeded campaign expectations and goals and made Season 5 our most successful to date,” says Amanda Brinkman, Deluxe’s chief brand officer.

Pandemic fears kept many Americans from being out in the open during the summer of 2020, but they clearly wished to hit the open road. Harley-Davidson saw this wistfulness in visits to its webpages related to its first electric motorcycle, but no one was booking test drives on the Harley-Davidson LiveWire. Paid search was the route for the “Riding Through the Pandemic” campaign, determined media agency Mediahub. The agency tells Adweek that by using a data-driven approach to performance marketing, Mediahub found the most effective way to target motorcycle enthusiasts was mid-funnel, “inside Google-owned properties, using advanced audience targeting, paired with Google’s social-inspired Discovery ad formats, to boost test-ride demand,” says Mohammad Haque, Mediahub’s vice president and director of search. “We created custom, personalized target audience and bike ad combinations for each creative execution so that they resonated uniquely with each of our targets and showed more action-forward imagery so people could visualize themselves on the bike and the open road.” The campaign resulted in a 100% quarterly jump in test-ride volume, which was up 365% year over year, Haque says.

Even though Kin Euphorics started serving the “sober curious” crowd years ago, 2020 really brought the nonalcoholic, buzz-inducing drinks into focus for Americans who were staying home during the pandemic. “As the public came to terms with the impact of the pandemic, we noticed an uptick of interest in maintaining a healthy lifestyle to support optimal physical and immune health,” says Ross Deutsch, Kin’s vp, revenue operations. “More and more new guests [how Kin refers to our customers] became interested in alternatives to consuming alcohol, due to the detrimental physical toll that alcohol can have on the body.” Research showing even long-term abstainers might be triggered by “irritability, anxiety, fear, sadness, anger or boredom” associated with social isolation to restart substance abuse had many seeking solutions. To that end, Hawke Media helped the mood-altering beverage supplier—which created content, hosted virtual events and doubled down on earned media during the pandemic—increase its monthly affiliate sales by 160%, year over year. Hawke worked with publishers and other affiliates to enhance ecommerce sales. “We focused our efforts on building relationships with premium affiliate partners that wielded like-minded audiences,” Deutsch says.

On Dec. 18, 2020, the FDA approved Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine. As of March 11, 2021, nearly 48 million doses of the Moderna vaccine had been administered. What helped get Moderna there was a full-page print ad in The New York Times in December and digital out-of-home advertising on the Times Square NASDAQ board. Moderna tells Adweek the ad was intended as a springboard to future efforts beyond the vaccine, but in 2020, the vaccine, and the print marketing, was a major factor in introducing “America and the world to Moderna’s mission,” according to Moderna’s agency, TBWA\Chiat\Day LA. FDA approval meant essential workers were going to start being vaccinated and many would research Moderna beforehand. Because research showed Americans had been looking for that information in newspapers during the pandemic, with readership up 18% over 2019, it made sense to place ads there. “With most of the world’s eyes on us, the most strategic way to get our message on the modern approach to medicine quickly and efficiently was by tapping the top print publications,” says an agency spokesperson. “This allowed us to reach a wide audience across industries, which was complemented by paid media banners and social media to showcase the depth of our journey and where we are headed through new research and development.” Recently, the U.S. government ordered 300 million doses, with an option to buy 200 million more, according to Moderna, and Americans are far more aware of the brand now. Moderna saw $571 million in Q4 2020 revenue on the strength of its emergency use authorization versus $14 million in Q4 2019.

Even as former President Donald Trump attempted to discredit mail-in voting during the 2020 election, marketing agency MRM was working on behalf of the United States Postal Service to encourage confidence in political mail. MRM needed to prove USPS could “Deliver the Win” for political mailers. Election mail such as mail-in ballots and political mail fall into different categories, and MRM was working with political mailers—campaigns, candidates, political parties or advocacy groups sending political messages. But the campaign needed to rise above the entire channel’s recent reputation. “While political mail has been a major source of revenue for USPS, mail is still perceived as outdated by many, contributing to a decline in mail volume across industries,” says Erin Koenig, who led the campaign for MRM. “With an aggressive 2020 political mail revenue goal, we had to make political mail relevant to a new, rising generation of political strategists, driving awareness of USPS mail innovations and mail’s influence on voters.” To that end, the agency created a website for the campaign, DeliverTheWin.com, and a direct mail campaign. The campaign brought in 112% more revenue than in previous election years, for a total of 4.7 billion pieces of political mail.

Nike once again took on a national issue with its content marketing, but this effort got the entire country of Japan to confront its bullying problem. “Nike: The Future Isn’t Waiting” by Wieden+Kennedy is a two-minute video depicting schoolchildren being taunted for being different. “At Nike, we have a long history of supporting those whose voices are not always heard and speaking up for causes that reflect our values,” says Barbara Guinet, Nike Japan’s senior director of marketing. “We believe sport has the power to demonstrate what a better world can look like, to unite and inspire people to take action in their communities.” Because of the controversial content in a country that prides itself on social harmony, Nike communications vp Kate Meyers says, the video garnered immediate attention—even before Nike completed its five-day distribution efforts across Nike.com, the Nike app, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and the media platform Teads. She says the day after launching the November campaign, it became the No. 1 trending topic on Twitter in Japan and continued trending for four days. The video has 17.1 million views on Nike Japan’s Twitter account. On YouTube, it has 11.4 million views. But the national and international attention it raised that resulted in hundreds of earned media mentions in 2020 continues to this day.

To be effective at helping customers generate leads, affiliate publishers have to earn their audiences’ trust. So there’s perhaps no more appropriate place for NortonLifeLock, a cyber safety and security provider, to market its product aimed at helping consumers safeguard their data. That’s just what Norton did in order to grow its Asia-Pacific market. Partnering with CJ Affiliate, a Publicis Media Groupe company, Norton’s customer acquisition rose 311% from January to July 2020 compared with January to July 2019, increased revenue growth by 35% and grew sales 116%. Granular data on larger publishing affiliates in the region allowed Norton to create custom payouts, according to CJ. “As a global leader in consumer cyber safety, NortonLifeLock considers affiliate marketing an integral part of its marketing channel mix in order to reach, empower and protect more consumers so they can live their digital lives safely,” NortonLifeLock’s marketing director Janet Shi tells Adweek. “NortonLifeLock sees further opportunities to unlock growth in more APAC countries and is actively working on expansion and optimization of its affiliate program in the region.”

Nutrisystem president Stephen Mikulak says that when lockdowns began in March, the company wanted to ensure consumers could stay healthy at home. So the company known for popularizing specialized meals, including for diabetics and those who want to lose weight, created convenient home delivery with its “Delivered to Your Door” campaign. About 80% of its business was online in 2020 and “the campaign was a huge success for us,” Mikulak says. The campaign resulted in double-digit revenue growth, with customer starts increasing more than 20% year over year. The campaign ran across traditional channels, such as TV, and digital channels, like YouTube and Facebook, creating awareness of the ecommerce option, according to Mikulak. And Nutrisystem tracked the campaign through specialized landing pages and phone numbers. 

OnePlus and T-Mobile got “phygital” with their winning campaign, the “OnePlus Go Farther” scavenger hunt. The physical-digital hybrid experience tasked fans with finding three real OnePlus pop-up stores hidden in remote locations in the U.S. to celebrate the launch of the OnePlus 8T+ 5G device. The brands tapped agency The Bait Shoppe to create the IRL empty stores and the website hub. The agency, with OnePlus and T-Mobile, launched a social program on Twitter announcing the program and teasing the locations. Then, the brand directed fans to a custom microsite with an interactive U.S. map, where fans could submit guesses and win prizes. The seven-day activation averaged 1,900 logins or guesses per hour and 41,000 guesses per day, with more than 9,000 correct guesses, allowing the brands to gather data for future marketing on a total of 319,200 opted-in campaign participants. Globally, the site averaged 1,035 users per minute. “Working closely with T-Mobile, our collaboration aimed to break the barriers of the standard digital consumer event and create a new virtual experience that generated real excitement, buzz and engagement for participants,” says Brian Woods, vp, OnePlus North America.

Beyoncé’s social media influence only continues to grow—her Instagram account gained 4 million followers during February 2021 alone—so it’s no surprise that after Peloton announced its partnership with its members’ most-requested musical artist, sign-ups with the on-demand and livestreaming fitness instruction provider grew by 800,000 during the last quarter of 2020. Peloton’s collaboration with Beyoncé, which commemorated school Homecoming season—a tradition that became virtual in 2020—traveled from its most popular social media account of 1.3 million Instagram followers to its member emails and beyond. “Our creative approach was cohesive and flexed over all of our channels,” says Alec Booker, Peloton Interactive’s communication manager of tech and innovation. “We knew we had to push ourselves to create a campaign that lifted Peloton to stardom level.” The “Peloton x Beyoncé” campaign video Peloton placed on its YouTube channel in November had 4.9 million views by February. The same video posted in late December and titled “Beyoncé Classes” had 17.8 million views by February. “Our community loved these classes, and the numbers show [it],” says Booker. Beyoncé touted the multiyear partnership on her website using the campaign graphic, which clicked onto her statement: “Peloton and I both believe that the power of music can help uplift, motivate and inspire those on their fitness journeys.” The messaging around the campaign celebrating Homecoming offered students attending Howard University and nine other historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) free two-year digital Peloton memberships. But Peloton’s year-over-year increase from 2 million to 4.4 million members during 2020 wasn’t solely due to the campaign. For millions of gym users who stayed home during the pandemic, Peloton became their go-to workout.

PerformLEAP by cost-per-acquisition affiliate marketing network Perform[cb] is a tracking platform that uses predictive algorithms and machine learning to provide personalized weekly updates to customers “based on client feedback and calibrated to our vision of providing true value alignment in performance marketing,” says Perform[cb] CEO Erin Cigich. For example, the platform helped insurance quote provider QuoteWizard by LendingTree generate 1.5 million leads, or 111% more than it had in 2019, by hypertargeting them across channels. Email drove 300,000 new leads to the client and, in an initiative started in the third quarter of 2020, SMS generated 50,000 leads. “By leveraging PerformLEAP’s unique features … Perform[cb]and QuoteWizard established several campaigns that enhanced audience reach via multiple traffic channels, including native, social, push notifications and pay per call,” says Jordan Ghiglia, QuoteWizard’s affiliate account manager. “PerformLEAP’s dayparting capabilities created variable pricing models for QuoteWizard based on time of day, day of the week, geographic location, device type and traffic channel.”

Postmates partnered with Chipotle, one of the delivery service’s 600,000 restaurants and retailers, on an email marketing campaign to increase customer engagement. The campaign looked to “eventize” the offers with an ’80s throwback: Plinko. Postmates emailed a Chipotle-branded Plinko board to customers, who were encouraged to play by dropping a “chip” on their screen to win codes for offers like free guacamole, a free burrito or $100 to order Chipotle on Postmates. Consumers who played the digital game could share their winnings on social media. The email entered Postmates customers’ inboxes on Sept. 17. “By engaging customers in an unexpected way, we drove our biggest app open day ever on Postmates,” says Brandon Teitel, senior vice president of brand strategy at Postmates. “This unique experience, paired with the power of the Chipotle brand, cut through the noise and doubled our sales on launch day,” says Tressie Lieberman, vice president digital marketing and off-premise at Chipotle, of Chipotle’s sales on the Postmates app. (Uber acquired Postmates on Dec. 1, 2020.)

Procurify’s sloth mascot, which is regularly depicted in a space suit, exemplifies the unusual lengths to which the spending and procurement software provider will go to communicate to its target audience that it can make slow things fast. But one lead-generation campaign stood out so much to one recipient of the autoplay, personalized video in a box mailed to him that Nativo founder Justin Choi tweeted a video of the video and box that’s been viewed more than 300 times. What’s especially notable about the b-to-b lead-generation campaign and the account-based marketing behind the packages and customized landing pages designed by Unbounce is that the campaign targeted only 50 prospects. Procurify targeted its audience so precisely that the video box, direct mail and email messages all directed recipients to customized landing pages for product demonstrations, and those efforts yielded a 38% demo rate, or leads who viewed the demos, according to Procurify.

Rite Aid’s competition is no longer just brick-and-mortar drug stores or even cloud healthcare entrants like Amazon, but telehealth and beyond. Hence, the drug-store chain’s move in March wasn’t only to provide enhanced ecommerce options for customers stuck at home during the pandemic, but also to drive an “RxEvolution” of its healthcare marketing. Rite Aid’s 6,400 pharmacists, educated in both alternative remedies and traditional medicine, are whole health advocates who encourage a holistic approach to health, according to Rite Aid, which trained its team and improved workflow processes to give pharmacists more time to provide guidance to customers. “To introduce new generations to its iconic brand, Rite Aid is elevating its in-store experience, increasing personalized digital engagement and refreshing merchandise to include a wide assortment of products with ingredients that resonate with millennial and Gen X females,” according to Rite Aid. At the end of 2020, the company credited its 12% year-over-year revenue increase to continued strength in both its Pharmacy Services and Retail Pharmacy segments. The retail segment delivered market share gains in both front-end and pharmacy, due in part to its “Perfect Fusion” campaign. “This targeted omnichannel campaign included broadcast television and radio, programmatic CTV, OTV, audio, and display, paid social, influencer marketing, email, public relations and paid search,” says Joseph Tertel, Rite Aid’s director, digital marketing.

Thinkific was on a mission in 2020 to celebrate and educate underrepresented women entrepreneurs and online business owners. Women of color hosted and spoke during the software company’s virtual summit from July 14-16 and were highly represented among the more than 25,000 attendees. One of the main reasons Thinkific generated so many leads from its virtual summit was the utter simplicity of its landing page created by Unbounce. When target audience members reached thinkific.com/thinkincolor2020/, they saw a woman of color, the campaign title “Think in Color 2020” and an area to input an email address next to a call-to-action button. Thinkific, a company that helps entrepreneurs create online course and membership sites, saw 27,000 event registrations to its 2020 free virtual event—a 157% increase from 2019. “‘Think in Color’ was a success because it was created to celebrate, connect and educate women of color entrepreneurs,” says XayLi Barclay, founder of Start Shoot Grow Video Academy and co-host of the virtual summit. “The authenticity really resonated with our audience and, as a result, we achieved all of our goals.”

A popular method of measuring the effectiveness of direct mail is measuring the response in another channel. For the United States Postal Service, that channel was email. “Informed Delivery,” which emails postal customers (who opt in) pictures of the mail arriving in their boxes, had a 69% open rate among its 33.5 million opted-in users as of January, says Mauresa R. Pittman, USPS acting strategic communications business partner. According to Pittman, more than 1,900 mailers and mail service providers, representing more than 10,000 brands in more than 82,000 interactive campaigns, experienced that 69% open rate during six months prior to January, according to USPS. On Jan. 22, Pittman tells Adweek, USPS had 33.48 million enrolled users, a 50% year-over-year increase, with a 638,000 weekly registration average over the previous four weeks. Pittman says a number of factors contributed to the growth, including two stimulus checks in 2020 that customers wanted to track, mail-in voting during the 2020 election and weather-related disasters. “USPS raised awareness of this beneficial feature to help during those challenging times,” Pittman says.