The Campaign

Let’s get into the Guinness World Records! That was the challenge when Nokia Malaysia applied the company’s “Connecting People” mantra to an idea designed to rejuvenate the brand among youngsters and their families. The integrated Nokia World’s Biggest Angry Birds Playground campaign was launched in Kuala Lumpur to break the Guinness World Record for “The Most People Playing in a Mobile Phone Game Relay”. This formed part of a strategy to revive the brand in Asia by engaging existing and potential users in discovering the cool and fun side of Nokia. The World’s Biggest Angry Birds Playground was created as a virtual arena in which people could connect to play Rovio’s Angry Birds puzzle game on their phones. Awareness was raised and interest sustained by mixing traditional and social media networks – such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter – after pre-event PR activities stoked up anticipation. The result was a Guinness World Record for “The Most People Playing in a Mobile Phone Game Relay” by achieving a total of 2,030 participants over 10 hours. This generated campaign website page views totalling 88,000, plus 90 items of on and offline media coverage – and tilted Nokia’s brand image towards fun and entertainment.

The Brief

The campaign sought to demonstrate Nokia’s ongoing commitment to modernizing the overall Symbian experience, creating more value for users and offering attractive entertainment capabilities. The ‘World’s Biggest Angry Birds Playground’ needed to connect Malaysians in a way that would enable them to discover just how much fun they could have with Nokia connecting them. This approach would play to Nokia’s “Connecting People” mantra, while appealing to a young social media-savvy target market and putting a youthful spring back into the brand’s step.

Results

Nokia carved out a place in the globally-renowned Guinness World Records after getting 2,030 players together for 10 hours in terms of “The Most People Playing in a Mobile Phone Game Relay”. Strong engagement with the Nokia Brand was demonstrated by the fact that the campaign drew 17,000 active users on Facebook and recruited an additional 9,000 Nokia Facebook fans. Campaign website page views totalled 88,000, while the 9,000 participants who pre-registered for the event amounted to a healthy database collection. ROI for the event, which generated 90 items of coverage across mainstream and online media, was calculated at more than RM2 million. The event added an entertaining and recreational characteristic to Nokia’s brand image in Malaysia and showed promise as a campaign that could be easily deployed in other markets around the world.

Execution

The event’s prime attraction was that it required a collective effort connected digitally to go for a Guinness World Record for “The Most People Playing in a Mobile Phone Game Relay”. The public was kept up to speed with preview sessions and a media and blogger launch, as well as interviews with Nokia executives and Rovio. Social media efforts included:  YouTube videos and flashmobs to post as Facebook and Twitter updates and promote campaign messages.  Inviting Malaysian celebrities and influencers to blog and tweet at the event.  Viral spreading of the Nokia-created Angry Birds Dance flashmob via YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.  Providing users and “friends” within Nokia, partner organizations and our social network with instant access to audio-visual highlights such as interviews and videos made by fans.  Real-time Facebook and Twitter alerts to live interviews.  A live Nokia Facebook interview with a Rovio executive.

The Situation

Nokia has been busy devising strategies in the Asian market to revive the brand, following a slide from global leadership that began in the early 2000s and saw a major dip in marketshare in 2004. The company started work to regain lost ground by producing innovative products, and the CEO identified the brand as Nokia’s prime mover, with customers as the sharpest focus of the Nokia ecosystem. A major part of the task in shifting the brand back towards center stage has been to spotlight Nokia’s fun and entertainment capabilities.

The Strategy

A successful campaign called for recognition of Malaysia’s fast-paced on and offline news cycle and the importance of capitalizing on a story while it’s hot. Making the most of the story’s lifespan called for an integrated social media campaign designed to complement campaign outreach and spread the message to as wide an audience as possible. Main elements included a Facebook marketing program, crowd-sourcing moves and online partnerships, with the campaign pulling together popular social bloggers, Nokia Rangers and online journalists with strong followings, as well as Nokia’s social media assets, such as Facebook and Twitter, to drive traffic to the event registration page. Campaign reach was extended to like-minded Angry Birds fans by tapping into online communities, such as Angry Birds Malaysia Facebook and Games and Developers Community Facebook. In addition, exclusive contests offered members a meet-and-greet session with the Rovio developer.