BU students win Data & Marketing Association (DMA) challenge

A team of four Master’s students studying Marketing at Bournemouth University have won the Data & Marketing Association (DMA) Talent Marketing Challenge for 2021, receiving the £1,000 prize for their winning campaign.

The DMA Talent Marketing Challenge this year was provided by ScotRail, a train operating company in Scotland. The brief challenged students to create a marketing campaign which would raise awareness and encourage travellers aged 18 to 30 to use their eco-friendly service, promoting the use of train and bicycle travel to explore Scotland.

At BU, the DMA Talent Marketing Challenge is used as the live brief for the assessment of the Institute of Data & Marketing accredited Digital Marketing unit, part of the MSc Marketing Management (Digital) degree. This type of assessment allows BU students to apply what they learn in their degree to a real-life situation.

A total of 36 teams entered the competition, and after a rigorous judging process, three teams were selected to pitch their campaigns to a panel of judges, formed of Scott Allan (Market Insights Analyst, ScotRail), Angus Duncan (Senior Social Media Officer, ScotRail), Barney Knibb (Head of Business Development, Optima Connect), Lisa McLauchlan (Community Manager Scotland, DMA) and Kate Burnett (General Manager, DMA Talent).

After successfully pitching their campaign, Liene Snukute, Megan Leonard, Lucy James and June Vorraa, team name DigiConnect, were selected as the winning team in the competition.

Watch DigiConnect’s winning Go Even Greener marketing campaign for ScotRail above.

James Dredge, Student Membership Marketing Manager at DMA Talent, commented: “DigiConnect’s pitch was brilliant, so polished and professional, with a fab campaign plan to go along with it.”

Dr Elvira Bolat, Director of Accreditation and Associate Professor in Digital Marketing at Bournemouth University, added: “Despite the challenging year, Liene, Megan, Lucy, and June created an incredible team of hard-working, creative and committed professionals. Their attitude to work, attention to detail but most importantly ability to carry out thorough research resulted in success.

“I would like to highlight how important the research was as the team conducted several complex explorations using web-based eye-tracking; detailed social media analytics research and great Recency-Frequency and Monetary analysis which informed their creative decisions.”

Dr Bolat continued: “The careful choice of tactics that delivered a great return on investments was eye-catching and something ScotRail could not ignore. I am really proud of the girls: despite such a busy time for them when they are working on their final master's dissertations, they took time to prepare a brilliant pitch and secure the win.”