Creative Execution

We created a name and tagline: ‘Hackdivate – be a legend and do good’, paying homage to coders with <div> being HTML code. We worked up ‘hacker dude’ – the campaign hero, reflecting our target (90% male) with co-developer characters for variety and gender balance. Hacker dude and friends made their first appearance in our promotional animation uploaded to YouTube and streamed at Cisco Live. This was followed by high impact video skins and site take-overs, job-role targeted social media. An online content series was filmed during Hackdivate. Tweets were orchestrated, blogs updated and charity partners also blogged.

The event was oversubscribed with 60 developers and five charities participating. Seven life-changing solutions were developed with five deployed for the organisations to date– from a support app to help cancer patients connect with care teams to an incident report log to help keep Sydney’s streets safe. Social media activity at the event was amplified across an organic Twitter reach of 1,016,420 accounts. The Hackdivate content series received over 200K views with a 75% average completion rate and 0.58% CTR to Cisco Cloud Services page at the end of the video (benchmark is 0.2%).

Business, marketing and communications objectives: Gain awareness and recognition of Telstra’s cloud technologies to drive enterprise sales. Target audience: IT pros working in medium to large corporations. A recent brand survey had found ‘declining consideration for Telstra within the enterprise marketplace’ with some IT pros only associating Telstra with network or phone connections. Strategy/idea: We founded our response in Benjamin Franklin’s quote: “Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.” Brainstorming with Telstra we decided to involve the audience in an activity that they naturally enjoyed. So we developed a hackathon series–a 48-hour challenge, where teams would compete to develop solutions for charities. They’d have free reign of Cisco Cloud Services (CCS) to create their solutions with experts on tap to answer questions. Plus the chance to win cash prizes and opportunities to take their projects further.