Which? is a British magazine, founded in 1957. It contains impartial, expert product reviews of consumer goods such as washing machines, cameras, and televisions for £10.75 per month

Which?’s expert reviews were created to help consumers make informed choices about “which” products to buy.

But in 2015, Which? membership had started to decline. Free and easy access to peer-to-peer reviews on places like Amazon were replacing the need for a Which? review.

The challenge was clear: we had to get people to pay for something they thought they could get for free.

To do this, Which? needed to move away from a direct response model to a brand response model. Which? could no longer just harvest interest in the brand, it had to generate it.

The answer to the challenge came by recognising that the strength of the open, people-powered platforms of the digital age had developed a weakness. Bad actors were afoot. Some reviews people were reading were fake.

Our idea to combat this and make Which? relevant again was:

Which? gives you the facts to fight fake reviews.

A Which? review is an independent review. It’s impartial and rigorous, packed with useful and important detail. This was the perfect solution to the issue of fake reviews.

But we went further by educating people about the issue. People were being duped by fake reviews, we empowered them with the information to fight them.

We created the first ever review of fake reviews.

Thanks to the spread of fake news online, the dominant view of the internet was being challenged by a new, emerging attitude.

People had previously trusted free information they believed was created by their peers. Now people had started to recognise that these platforms contained information that might not be trustworthy.

After some research, we found that peer-to-peer reviews were also vulnerable.

Reviews were now being written for money to boost ratings.

Some reviews people were reading were fake.

By educating people about the issue of fake reviews, we woke them up to questioning reviews they were reading. We made people realise why they needed a Which? review over a free one.

After positioning Which? as the solution, we simply directed people to which.co.uk to find the facts and beat the fakes.

Google search data showed us Black Friday was the time of year people were most in need of product reviews. Conjoint data showed that London was where the Which? reviews offering most appealed. This is how we decided where and when to focus our media spend.

To cut through we used broadcast media to build salience of our message, whilst using programmatic display media to target people who were looking at information on relevant products online. Purple became our calling card, linking the campaign across various media and standing out from the black and reds that dominated the Black Friday advertising landscape.

We even worked with Which? to create our own rigorous investigation into fake reviews – creating headlines in newspapers across the UK at the start of the campaign.

In the face of membership that was declining, the campaign generated a +13% uplift in sign-ups. Conversion from the website increased by +30% from a new, younger generation of consumers. We increased brand image perceptions of ‘modern’ and ‘relevant’ by 41% and 49% respectively.

This was all despite the campaign going live in the run up to Black Friday and Christmas, where Amazon spent 65x more than we did trying to get people go directly to them. This was also a time where consumer confidence was at an all-time low. This meant less people were likely to have been buying products than normal.

PR:

Coverage: 86 pieces

Reach: 22.5 million

Brand awareness:

Ad awareness: +29% YoY

Brand awareness: +5% YoY

Direct response:

Brand search: +45%

Display CTR: + 223%

Web engagement:

Web sessions: +19% YoY

Organic app installs: +61% YoY

Acquisition:

Sign-ups: +13% YoY