Me-VC, More Than Just A TVC

Building intrigue and interest in a product through creative content production

Challenge

Cup-A-Soup purchasers have always had a high tendency to repeat purchase. The key is always to engage at as many of them as possible at the beginning of the “soup season” knowing that if we get them to purchase at the beginning of winter they are likely to buy soup all winter.

With this key insight in mind, and following a successful pilot promotion in the Netherlands, Continental decided to launch the best Cup-A-Soup ‘Freecup’ marketing campaign in Australia with a modest objective of engaging 20,000 soup drinkers in a short 4 week period in May.

The initial digital brief in line with this modest objective was to simply extend the reach of the ‘Freecup’ message by serving the campaign TVC through digital media and to provide a basic mechanism for online cup redemption.

The most successful branded online content activations are when the strategy is more than simply putting a TVC online. Serving a TVC online is a passive approach; we believed the potential engagement levels could be far greater with a far more interactive approach.

Response

Deepend created the strategy to engage the audience by allowing them to interact with the TVC. 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.

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. The result is seamless. Only a trained eye could possibly notice the difference between the original TVC and the digital campaign.

The delivery of this video content is the most unique aspect to the campaign. The ‘choose your own adventure’ interactive video was served in banner on Yahoo!, SMH and News.com.au. This enabled viewers to play the game in banner without having to be redirected to the cup redemption site to enjoy the game which Eyeblaster have confirmed to be a ‘media first’.

Result

The extended engagement role of digital has been a central reason why the campaign has exploded beyond initial expectations. The digital media served over 9 million impressions with click through rates for the interactive placements as high as 0.57%.

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.

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.

Deepend’s in-house director, Nick Pollack, has since won the highly acclaimed Australian Directors Guild award for ‘Best Achievement in Directing for New Media Platforms’ for this Cup-A-Soup shoot. Not a measure of success of the whole campaign, the stats should show that, but a nice pat on the back for Nick none-the-less.

Awards

2009

AIMIA

Best Online Video

Finalist

2009

Australian Directors Guild

Best Direction for New Media Platforms

Winner

28% sales growth!

50% increase during the promotion period

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