Results and Effectiveness

Two months, thousands of people, and potentially billions of webpages later, one person made it to the Edge of the Internet and claimed the $20,000 prize. His name was Tom. There were 7,430 unique players. This activity generated over 274,000 minutes of engagement - that's over a quarter of a million minutes of using the product. And organic conversations spread in the blogosphere and social platforms, creating positive buzz for Internet Explorer 9.

Creative Execution

We created the world's largest online game using the entire internet – all 25.6 billion web pages of it. Players used Internet Explorer 9 to navigate through the internet, page by page, to be first to reach the end of our simple, yet elaborate maze. While doing so, they unknowingly trialled the product. Mathematics shows that 20 links to sites each containing 20 more links generates 400 possible pathways. If each of these links to 20 more sites, that's 8000 pathways, then 160,000, and so on until you have 25.6 billion links in just 7 steps - the exact size of the internet! So we only had to create 7 websites, each containing 20 links: 19 to other people's websites, 1 to the next step in our chain. Players couldn’t tell which sites were ours and which were part of the immense internet. Maths + digital media. Brilliant.

Insights, Strategy and the Idea

Internet Explorer 9, Microsoft's latest version web browser, had been on the market for over a year. Microsoft needed to create buzz and engagement, boost brand perception, and encourage trial. The target audience are tech-savvy geeks, some are loyal to other web browsers, some switch between different browsers. They all know Microsoft products but need encouragement to trial the products. We had to create an engagement campaign that encouraged trial of Internet Explorer 9 without feeling like it was a test-drive.