For those who were at the WIT Conference last October, you’ll remember Lawrence Kuok, Manager, Digital Marketing, Starwood Hotels & Resorts Asia Pacific presenting a Facebook campaign that yielded unbelievable ROI.

Well, that campaign and the agency that executed it, Brand Karma, has won the i-com’s Data Creativity Award for Emerging Markets – which basically meant that the hospitality-focused social media analytics agency was most creative in unlocking insights in marketing data to produce results.

Said CEO & co-founder of Brand Karma, Morris Sim, who was in Seville, Spain, to attend the 5th I-Com Global Summit, said, “We were one of eight agencies selected, Yes, unbelievable but we beat out Omnicom, Havas, and Razorfish.”

When Kuok presented at WIT, he said Starwood had presented a brief to agencies “to make me a million dollars on Facebook”. He received a few standard pitches but the one that he bit on was the one by Brand Karma who essentially said, “We don’t know if it will work but we will try.”

The idea was to launch a travel exclusives page on Facebook that would allow the group’s network of hotels in Asia Pacific to promote their deals.

Since then, the Starwood Travel Exclusives Facebook page has yielded US$2 million in revenues in Asia thanks to targeted Facebook page post ads on a budget of roughly $40,000. As of today, the page has 313,884 likes but it proves it’s not the number of likes a page gets but the kind of content that drives a call to action and transactions.

Co-founder of Brand Karma, Mario Jobbe, presented those numbers along with the eyebrow-raising claim that the social ads at times produced as high as a 50X return on investment. The initiative is going global due to the results. (Picture shows Mario Jobbe (centre) and Starwood Asia Pacific director of digital Janice Chan (on his right) accepting the award in Seville)

I-COM launched the first ever Data Creativity Awards in 2012 to recognize the fact that data driven marketing has risen in popularity and Sri Martin Sorrell, in an article, dubbed it  “Creativity in the Age of the Maths Men’.

The full list of awards is here. See article in AdWeek that covered the awards.