Last night the inaugural Hull Digital Awards took place at the newly opened Centre for Digital Innovation (C4DI) in Hull, and Summit was thrilled to win the awards for best ecommerce and best digital innovation, for ground-breaking work with our clients, Rockar and Argos.

The awards ceremony was hosted by Rory Cellan-Jones, BBC technology reporter and Martha Lane-Fox, co-founder of travel retailer Lastminute.com, and was attended by a range of digital industry leaders from East Yorkshire and beyond, including Director General of the BBC, Tony Hall. The venue, Hull’s new digital hub, C4DI, opened its doors to the public for the first time earlier in the day. Working in partnership with KC, Hull Digital, the University of Hull and a number of digital and technology companies including Summit, C4DI aims to provide a unique business space in order to help drive Hull and East Yorkshire’s digital sector forward.

Summit had been shortlisted for the best ecommerce award with automotive retailer, Rockar, and the best digital innovation award with Argos.

Best ecommerce – Rockar: changing the way people buy cars

Rockar’s dream was to enable customers to buy cars online, with no need to visit a showroom or dealer. Summit was engaged to carry out a comprehensive customer research project in order to establish whether the idea could become a commercially successful business.

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With the insight we learned from our research we were able to create a streamlined, simple online environment that gives users the capability to purchase a new car, including part exchange, payment and delivery, in minutes. Since its launch at the end of last year, Rockar has thrived, generating double the sales of an average dealership and attracting customers who would usually be expected to purchase a used car. The project has revolutionised automotive retailing, and has been shortlisted for a number of awards, including best automotive at next month’s Masters of Marketing Awards.

Best digital innovation – Argos: synchronising paid search with TV, weather and seasonality

Summit has enjoyed a long and successful relationship with high street giant, Argos, generating record-breaking results using multichannel online marketing. Our innovative and industry-leading performance marketing tool,Forecaster, uses predictive analytics to enable us to spend every penny of budget in the right place at the right time in order to generate the greatest possible return. In 2014 we developed new facets of Forecaster that would allow us to sync Argos’ paid search ads with external factors such as TV advertising, weather changes and annual product seasonality. These factors all have an impact on customer buying behaviour, and, using Forecaster, we are able to react in real time to changes in these variables and ensure Argos’s ads are in the right place at the right time. Argos’ paid search revenue has grown by 35% in the last year, and despite significantly increased budgets the cost of sale has remained well below target.

We were up against hugely innovative projects from the best of the East Yorkshire area’s digital and technology companies, and we are overjoyed to have triumphed in both categories. We thoroughly enjoyed the evening and look forward to next year!