The Campaign

Virgin Mobile asked us to drive an additional 50,000 unique visitors to their website in December, to capitalize on the pre-Christmas sales period. They wanted a ‘socially enabled’ campaign, which effectively utilized social media, provoked mass engagement and sparked conversations amongst their youth target audience. We were required to ensure the campaign was consistent with their ‘Fair Go’ platform. Our idea was to launch Australia’s biggest socially enabled finders keepers initiative called ‘A Fair Ride For All’, which saw Virgin Mobile give away 25 push bikes every week for 3 weeks, Across Australia. Bikes were hidden in secret locations and we released clues every day at midday via the campaign hub - FairRide.com.au. The site was optimized for mobile and tablet use, ensuring hunters could participate on the go, essential for a real time finders keepers initiative. To promote the campaign, we created a teaser video and this was seeded to influential bloggers across youth and popular culture. To join the ‘hunt’ people reviewed the bikes at the campaign site, ‘liked’ the hunt for the bikes they wanted to win and then followed the clues, released via Facebook’s innovative ‘open graph’ platform. In the three weeks A Fair Ride For All was live, nearly 100,000 visitors to the mobile site spending an average of 12 minutes there. The campaign generated over thirty thousand social actions and reached over half a million people through Facebook alone. During the last week of the campaign, Virgin Mobile experienced their best sales day ever.

The Brief

Virgin Mobile asked us to drive an additional 50,000 unique visitors to their website in December, to capitalize on the critical pre-Christmas sales period. They told us they wanted a ‘socially enabled’ campaign, which effectively utilized social media, provoked engagement and sparked conversations amongst their youth target audience. Our research into their market led us to identify the rise in popularity around push-bikes, particularly with youth influencers in the music and popular culture scene in Australia and we recgonised that this was a cultural phenomenon that we could aim to successfully leverage.

Results

In the three weeks A Fair Ride For All was live, nearly 100,000 visitors spent an average of eight and a half minutes on the site, with visitors to the mobile site spending an average of 12 minutes. The campaign generated over thirty thousand social actions and reached over half a million people through Facebook alone, grabbing attention across Australia and the world. We set out to drive 50,000 visitors to the site but this innovative, unique treasure hunt sparked mass engagement and as a result we more than doubled this target. And best of all, during the last week of the campaign Virgin Mobile experienced their best sales day ever.

Execution

Bikes were hidden in secret locations across five states and we released clues every day at midday via the campaign hub - FairRide.com.au. The site was optimized for mobile and tablet use, ensuring hunters could participate on the go, essential for a real time finders keepers initiative. To promote the initiative, we created a teaser video and this was seeded to influential bloggers across youth and popular culture. It was also pushed out via Virgin Mobile’s own social channels, which amplified the ‘Fair ride’ Twitter hashtag. To join the ‘hunt’ people reviewed the bikes at the campaign site, ‘liked’ the hunt for the bikes they wanted to win and then followed the clues. The initiative used Facebook’s brand new ‘open graph’ technology, which meant that once consumers signed up to the initiative, we were able to push notifications about the hunt they had ‘liked’ into their Facebook newsfeed.

The Situation

In 2010, Virgin Mobile set out to inject some fairness into the Australian telco landscape - to help do this, they developed a brand platform called ‘A Fair Go For All’ and created ‘Robin da Hood’ to take on the role of people’s champion in their advertising. In December 2011, Virgin Mobile asked us to expand their ‘Fair Go’ proposition to deliver a campaign via social media that would engage consumers and drive people to their website during the critical pre-Christmas period.

The Strategy

Our idea was to launch Australia’s biggest socially enabled finders keepers initiative called ‘A Fair Ride For All’, which saw Virgin Mobile give away 25 awesome push bikes every week for 3 weeks, Across Australia. The campaign was designed to build on the consumer’s familiarity with Virgin Mobile’s ‘Fair Go’ proposition and to leverage their established brand assets. The bikes given away were premium and very desirable amongst our target audience, to ensure maximum social currency in terms of talkability. Consumers could engage with the campaign via any social platform, but the central campaign hub lived on Virgin Mobile’s website.