The Campaign

Instead of launching a promotion, we launched a small business. We started with The Olympics for Small Business, a prize so good even ex-Olympians are starting small businesses to win it. Our PR-led integrated campaign saw Australian icon Ian Thorpe as the CEO and founder of Thorpedo Pool Cleaning – a fake small business we set up. Ian became the star of our fully integrated and highly targeted campaign, with everything leading to olympicsforsmallbusiness.com – an easy-to-navigate user experience that helped SMB owners set up their own entry page, as well as start a conversation with their customers to vote for them.

Creative Execution

We launched with a fake ad for Ian’s faux small business that ran unbranded and was picked up online, on social and TV. A 3-minute mockumentary followed, explaining “The Small Business Olympics” and why Ian entered. The humorous and highly engaging video gave as an effective medium to explain the promotion and its value for SMBs. We worked with media to identify the SMB audience and their interests on social to serve them targeted content, driving click-throughs to the promotional website. Communications led to a dual-purpose entry page, allowing businesses to register for the grand prize as well as for suppliers/customers to give support by voting for them. SMBs could also download a campaigner kit to help engage with their suppliers/customers for support, and win a $10,000 prize. • Completion rate of over 74% for business registrations • Average of 3m 28s spent on site. • 40% of traffic was return visitors.

Describe the success of the promotion with both client and consumer including some quantifiable results

Business Impact: SMB sales result up 40% YoY Response Rate: Over 4000 new business leads Change in behavior: Over 50% non-Optus customer entries and 40% in return visitors on site traffic, with an average of 3m 28s spent on site across all visitors. Awareness: Over 1 million video views and 52.7m in editorial reach.

Explain why the method of promotion was most relevant to the product or service

With four all expenses paid double passes to give away and an ambitious small business sales target to reach, we needed a smart campaign that could engage, promote and entice our existing and potential SMB customers to get involved for a chance to win. Good thing we had a prize worth starting a small business for.

Partnering with Olympian Ian Thorpe, we launched a teaser ad for Thorpedo Pool Cleaning, which after creating a social and PR buzz we followed up with a mockumentary documenting his attempt to run a business that could win “The Small Business Olympics”. We targeted this content to SMB groups on social using a single minded CTA, to drive click-throughs to the promotional website for entries. The website allowed businesses to register for the grand prize whilst also allowing suppliers and customers to show support, by voting for them. To make things even simpler for SMBs, we gave them $10k to offer and a downloadable campaigner kit to help them engage with their suppliers and customers for support to win. By opening our competition to all SMB’s we could invite non-Optus customers to enter and upsell products to them, whilst using our existing customers to promote the competition to their wider network.