CaseDay19: celebrating excellence in building digital businesses

Remember going to a candy store as a kid? And how it felt when you could only pick a handful of sweets from the colorful collection on display? That’s how the jury felt last week at Emakina Group’s Caseday19, at the Dolce venue in the Brussels’ Sonian Forest. The event showed a mature organization uniting 19 offices, confident in serving top companies with high-end digital and marketing services across 3 continents.

Digital marketing excellence

Once more, this annual event honored the digital marketing excellence of the almost 1,000 talents in the group. 150 agency delegates assembled from across the four winds to share their best insights and work, rub shoulders with their colleagues and enjoy some ‘chill’ quality time together. But the jury definitely had a tough job, having to select the winners out of the fine selection of top work executed by the group’s agencies over the last year.

+ 2,000 cases

Each year, the teams in the group complete over 2,000 major projects. Out of this massive activity, 40 top cases were selected to be entered in the competition. All 40 brilliant, yet only 24 could be admitted to be presented by their ambassadors at the CaseDay. They participated in the ‘Creativity’, ‘Tech’, ‘Bizz’ and ‘Integrated’ categories, all highlighting successful collaborations with fantastic clients in multiple domains.

From values to results

Brice Le Blévennec, CEO of Emakina, was enthusiastic about the quality of the entries: ‘This CaseDay offered a striking new testimony of the wealth and diversity of the excellent teamwork with our clients in so many sectors. Every agency in its own way showed how it translates its entity’s values and expertise into fantastic results, that boost the business of their patrons.’

Agile guides

A case of Design is Dead, for instance, perfectly illustrated their baseline, ‘Agile Guides in Digital Journeys’. For a major international airport, they teamed up with the client to design and implement a data architecture to serve use cases in real time, deploying staff on site and managing luggage flows ‘on the fly’. Not only a fine display of maximizing the advantages of state-of-the-art technology but also of creating a new shared mindset across an organization.

It’s Your Business

The Reference also clearly proved they do what they preach: ‘Its more than digital, it’s your business’. The agency won gold in the Integrated category, for their DP World project. The global trade enabler now digitizes the entire truck flow at the Antwerp 1700 Gateway terminal. With a new app. To promote the use of this tool to the truck drivers, The Reference also launched a campaign, reaching potential users through clever interest-based targeting, with a fresh concept and design combined with automated targeting across several platforms and social advertising. ​

The agency also won a second gold award, in the ‘Bizz’ category. The winning case started when a leading retail player asked the question ‘Do you guys know Tableau?’ It evolved from day-to-day reporting support into business intelligence, and then into full-blown predictive modeling​, and the proof that omnichannel customers can bring in significantly more business that instore visitors.

Emakina is the User Agency

Of course, the agencies in the group operating under the Emakina name also added their special magic to the party. ‘Happy users grow successful businesses’ is their motto across 9 countries, and because every user is different, the teams need to cater to their specific needs.

Emakina’s agency working for BEKO home appliances won gold in the Tech category. This open and intensive collaboration achieved a big boost in user engagement. They built a mobile-first reference app for the international market with a multi-country and multi-language design, combining Adobe, SAP Hybris and Salesforce solutions. ​

The rebranding and new website for premium lubricants company Bardahl also encompassed e-commerce objectives, with a focus on business users, from mechanics to race drivers. The agile methodology driving the collaboration and the multiple design sprints paid off. And Bardahl embraced Emakina’s crew as part of their family, and the website won the ‘Best Kentico E-commerce Website of the Year’ award.

The Swedish Emakina team won gold in Creativity, with the SBAB bank case. Last year, their ‘Household Finances are Really Fun’ campaign already filled one of Stockholm’s biggest venues with a crazy comedy show, boosting sales and winning multiple awards. And now they reeled in younger users. How? With ​a white horse, a half-nude comedian, and a catchy hip-hop beat. The music video scored over 5.5 million views, while the house remix pumped serious beats into hot summer parties.

Group CEO Brice Le Blévennec concludes:
‘We fight alongside our customers to deliver outstanding user experiences and build high performance digital businesses. The CaseDay once again highlighted the impressive capabilities in the group’s entities. This meeting energized all the participants. They take home new insights that will help them to better serve our clients, delivering projects with even more creativity, sector and digital experience expertise.’

A big round of applause for all talents, partners, and clients making this magic happen every day!

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Emakina Group Case Day 2019 with a full auditorium #emakina

A post shared by Emakina Group (@emakina) on Sep 13, 2019 at 12:38am PDT