JUDGING THE WARC/WOM AWARDS

We had the pleasure of being on the judging panel (alongside rather more esteemed figures like Mark Earls and Dr Paul Marsden) for the World Advertising Research Centre/WOM UK's Word Of Mouth Awards today and a fascinating process it was too.

Without giving anything away which we're not supposed to be giving away (the shortlist is to be released tomorrow, but the winners won't be announced until December's Word of Mouth Marketing Masterclass 2008), here's some of the aspects of the day which most stood out.

Measuring WOM - there's loads of good ideas out there but we're clearly some way off the definitive solution. At present, solutions can roughly be divided into the camp which requires you to put all of your faith in a mysterious black box/tool that crunches up a wealth of different component data, spitting out a singular piece of data that purportedly states how successful or not your WOM campaign has been; or, alternatively, you go for the rather more crude but nonetheless arguably more transparent route of reeling off a range of dizzyingly diverse KPIs. There were some examples of work in which attempts are being made at reconciling both online and offline word of mouth in measurements, which was good to see.

What does a good WOM campaign look like? We had some great WOM case studies to look over and a really interesting range of perspectives on what constitutes a WOM campaign. There was the commercially persuasive if somewhat narrowband approach which seems tailormade for marketing new FMCG products but rather restrictive in other realms; and a rather more eclectic approach (taking in everything from virals, brand ambassador programmes and co-creation exercises) that has WOM marketing more as a mindset than a rigorous process. Also, there were some really interesting first stabs at getting brands to think about WOM more through developing sustainable platforms and new takes on brand/customer relations rather than solely in marketing campaign terms.

So, lots of polarity in the thinking, but that's no bad thing for WOM marketing at present. Hopefully any pressures which may exist to come up with a cookie cutter approach can be avoided for the time being, as the notion of what is/isn't word of mouth marketing needs challenging a whole lot more before rules should start to dictate proceedings. Intriguing, illuminating stuff and pleasing to see that genuine insight and planning had gone into a lot of the offerings.