Following a successful pilot ‘free personalised cup’ campaign in the Netherlands, Continental Cup-A-Soup decided to launch the Cup-A-Soup ‘free personalised cup’ promotion in Australia; with a serious twist!
The ‘free personalised cup’ campaign centred on a television commercial featuring Peter; a socially inept man struggling to find acceptance in a workplace where no one knows his name. Deepend looked to explode the use of this TVC online by creating a bespoke piece of branded content with the TVC at the heart.
We created a number of interactive back stories to the campaign TVC allowing the audience to choose their preferred option and watch how the next scene unfolded – an interactive ‘choose your own adventure’ video. Once completed successfully, the video ends on the final scene from the original TVC, tying in creatively with the campaign and delivering the ‘free personalised cup’ message.
One of the biggest creative challenges was to match a big budget TVC campaign with a digital campaign that had limited budget, and limited shoot time, seamlessly. One had to blend into the other without any obvious difference.
The pre-production for the video shoot was the extensive. We had to envisage a greater world that fit in seamlessly with the one covered in the TVC whilst still using the same tone, humour and approach. The continuity of each shot had to be well planned ensuring it followed on from the previous scene. Each video had to work as an individual piece but also as the sum of all its parts.
The in-house Deepend video team conceived, wrote, cast, produced, directed and filmed the whole interactive video on location in New Zealand at the same location as the original TVC. To further help the matching of the new footage with the old, we also employed a similar short, sharp editing style to that used in the TVC.
All videos were also optimised for fast download times, making it an instantaneous way through the adventure. Once completed successfully, the video ends on the final scene from the original TVC, tying in creatively with the campaign and delivering the ‘free personalised cup’ message.
The result is seamless. Only a trained eye could possibly notice the difference between the original TVC and the digital campaign.
The campaign site accumulated 203,675 visits with a staggering 125,000 cups redeemed during the campaign period, over 5 times as many cups as hoped for. The Choose Your Own Adventure video was also served in digital media (a media first!) which generated over 9 million impressions with click through rates on
Facebook advertising as high as 0.57%.
This translated to a 28% growth in soup sales in 2009 over 2008 and a 50% increase during the promotion period making it the best ever year for Continental Cup-A-Soup in Australia.
It has since won the highly acclaimed Australian Directors Guild award for ‘Best Achievement in Directing for New Media Platforms’ for this piece of branded content.
