_Role

My role on this project was Project Manager whilst providing insight and guidance to the User Experience and Information Architecture of the campaign.

_Awards

Silver – 2011 Loerie Awards

_Brief

MSN commissioned us to virally position its new portal, Howzit MSN, as the leading online news destination for South African Internet browsers and to communicate the variety of international and local content Howzit MSN has on offer.

Intended Audience: Existing Howzit MSN users and all web users who search for news content online. The target age group is roughly 22–45, with an even male/female split.

_Solution

We created ‘The Insider’, a viral spoof news campaign, originating from a stand-alone microsite that allowed people to create scam stories about their friends and spread them on the real MSN platform.

After reading these outrageous, but lighthearted stories, those scammed, as well as those just enjoying the scam stories of others, would also be enlightened about the wide breadth of real news stories on offer on the growing MSN portal.

The microsite was presented in the format of a sensationalist news channel called The Insider. After being directed to it by means of a banner or Facebook post, visitors were requested to select one of four fictitious news scandals covering a range of Howzit MSN news categories. They then automatically logged in via Facebook Connect, selected the person they intended to place at the centre of the scandal, chose a suitable photograph from their chosen friend’s album, and finally, provided a few personal details about their friend.

They were then able to preview the scandal, which was personalised to include their friend’s information and picture, live on the real Howzit MSN site. Once they were happy with the result, the scandal was posted to the relevant individual’s Facebook wall and all that remained was to sit back and enjoy the response it received as the article was shared via Facebook, twitter and email.

To give an unusual and added depth to the viral campaign, those scammed could continue with a reprisal component, without the knowledge of the person who scammed them. This gave the friend who had been at the centre of the spoof news scandal a chance to have the last laugh. If they took up the offer, a spoof email was sent by MSN on their behalf to the individual who initiated the prank.

The outcome was a humorous, but brand-relevant experience for all involved, as well as a great viral campaign that helped spread the word about Howzit MSN’s amazing content.

_Role

My role on this project was Project Manager whilst providing insight and guidance to the User Experience and Information Architecture of the campaign.

_Awards

Webby’s 2011 – Best Website
Loeries 2010 – Gold (Digital Crafts), Bronze (Mixed Media)
Habari Facebook Awards 2010 – Most effective Facebook Campaign

_Brief

FIFA.com commissioned us to help position the online brand in South Africa in a more accessible way to all football fans, whilst re-affirming themselves at the heart of the game.
Intended Audience:
Anyone online who is interested in football, who has access to broadband and who would normally engage with YouTube videos.

_Solution

A viral campaign using a microsite at its core.
To help offset the general impression of FIFA being a cold and dry brand, the site creates a warm personality behind a mythical football team called the Magic Moments FC.

The players are your every day man in the street, with more passion than ability! But they love the game and they represent the heart of the game of football itself. At first, When you visit the site it isn’t clear whether they are talented and highly skilled players or not, and this provides extra fun and humour when you see the reveal of the videos, which in turn adds to the viral-ability of the site.

Phase 1 sees the players re-enact their favourite 5 goals from World Cups gone by and arguably the most memorable moments in football history.

The fact is, they could never do these goals justice, so they find another way of re-enacting the goals with a help of their 12th man, dressed in green astroturf. The resulting style of these videos is amateur c-grade movies, that the team regard with utmost pride.

This is something they live for at weekends and take very seriously. So seriously that they offer to give away 3 articles from their prized collection of football memorabilia, to the person that suggests the best goal from this years World Cup, for them to re-enact and add to the site.

Our team created the core concept and directed the content for this site, as well as building the microsite.

The site contains added depth with behind the scenes footage of their celebration and warm up techniques. Also information about all the players and their 2 key cheerleaders who happily join them in their hobby.

To make maximum impact of the brand association we decided to keep phase 1 unbranded and only reveal the brand in phase 2 as an unexpected twist, which will generate another wave of interest and buzz for the experience.

Phase 2 sees FIFA.com reveal it’s support for the team and shows their help to re-enact the chosen goal from the recent 2010 world Cup, using the extra magic of the FIFA.com brand.

_Results / Outcomes

141,665 unique people to date (and growing) have viewed the experience either via the site directly or a viral video. (Currently 121,453 uniques visited the site and an extra 20,212 watched viral videos on other platforms)

1,042 people have also signed up as fans to the FaceBook fanpage that is directly linked to the site (only 4% of all fanpages in the world have over 1000 fans)

The site has also been featured by many sites and blogs, and has even been discovered and reported in a double page spread in Europe’s well known 442 footballers magazine.

The FaceBook campaign was rated by FaceBook in the top 5 creatives in August 2010 across Africa and Middle Eastern region, with a click through rate of 2.23% (average being 0.5%).

This is a truly viral experience that has attracted and continues to attract football fans across South Africa.

_Role

My Role on this project was that of Project Manager.

_Awards

Loeries 2010 – Bronze

_Brief

Despite a limited advertising budget, Puma was looking for a way to outsmart FIFA with a successful campaign showcasing its love=football concept during the 2010 Football World Cup held in South Africa.

_Solution

The campaign, conceptualised by Gloo, centred around World Cup fans and their love of football. The ambush marketing campaign consisted of two viral videos capturing the World Cup from a spectators point of view, but bringing the famous love=football icon to life in an unusual way.

Using a combination of raw footage shot combined with CGI renderings, Gloo created realistic representations of what appeared to be innovative brand activations taking place in and around the Cape Town stadium.

The first video showed some tourists on a helicopter tour of Cape Town. They are seen taking in the city’s sights, when they spot a large number of vehicles on the fields next to Green Point stadium, which move to form the love=football icon.

In the second video, fans are seen videoing their experience inside the stadium during the World Cup game between Portugal and Korea. Just before a goal is scored, they look up to see the love=football icon in skywriting above the stadium.

Both videos were anonymous and included no branding. However all discussion online by journalists and commentators referred strongly to Puma, therefore providing strong promotion for the brand.

_Outcome

The videos created a buzz on the social media scene, both here in South Africa and around the world, with the number of views in the first 4 weeks reaching 74,231 across various video sharing sites. The videos were featured on sites such as Football Marketing, MSN and many other blogs. Also reaching number 1 spot on YouTubes Honour List for ‘Most Viewed People & Blogs’ in South Africa.

Continuing the brand’s tradition of innovative advertising, this latest offering will definitely be remembered as one of the greatest stunts of the 2010 World Cup.

There have been a few delays in me upgrading to the latest version of WP – mainly because of my hosting provider’s legacy version of MySQL. WP3.2.1 requires MySQL 5 or higher, and until recently I was running on v.4. There were instructions in the knowledge base on how to upgrade manually, but it seemed like a lot of work for something that I was sure they would need to tackle eventually. I was right.

At first galnce, it is really cool. Kinda like Ai’s writer all wrapped up in the browser. I never really thought about how much the extra buttons around you actually serve to distract you from really getting down to writing. Recently I have been feeling rather ADD when tackling many tasks, especially getting down to writing, but this clean environment really does focus your attention purely on getting your thoughts down.

I also recently upgraded to OSX Lion, and it seems to be a pervasive feature amongst todays leading software manufacturers (I’m very broadly sweeping Apple and WP under the same brush here – I’m sure there are others too) to cut back heavily on unused functionality, whilst focussing on the core user tasks. This is a good thing, and has been trumpeted over and over by UX evangelists for years now.

There are a whole slue of new and fascinating devices and interfaces entering the market at a rapid rate. Just yesterday Amazon announced their Fire tablet, with it’s own browser built on the back of Google’s Android OS. Facebook also recently announced that they will be rolling out a few major changes to their service – the biggest of these being the replacement of current profile pages to the new Timeline interface – which is going live tomorrow. Finally there is also the highly anticipated announcement of the new Apple iPhone expected next week – 3 October. It’s a crazy few weeks in Internet Land.

As we enter a space where the major internet players are increasingly competing for users’ attention (admittedly they’ve been at this for quite some time – but we’re feeling it now more than ever) the way in which we experience these products – be it a hardware device or application interface – is increasingly going to effect our immediate impressions towards that product. Being able to strip away the bloated “additional” features, and get straight to the core of what makes an application useful to the user, is what will keep us coming back for more.

I enjoyed writing this post, because nothing distracted me (except my wife arriving home halfway through writing it).

Barely Legal in the Ukraine by emilbergh