The Campaign

GEeks go for #cc9900 is a global tech challenge that put the best coders from 138 countries around the world to the test. As part of GE’s sponsorship of the Rio Olympics, we used the world’s largest event to talk to one of the world’s smallest audiences – software engineers. GE machines working in Rio initiated conversations on twitter in binary code - a language that coders just couldn't ignore. Hidden in the machines’ tweets was the first of 3 challenges that quickly went from hard, to mind-numbingly impossible.

Creative Execution

GEeks go for #cc9900 is a 3-part tech challenge that quickly escalated in difficulty from relatively hard, to mind-bogglingly impossible. The first challenge, was to turn binary from GE_LED1’s twitter feed into ASCII art. The second, was to write code to find binary hidden in a gigapixel image (or you could spend days searching for it). The final challenge bordered on impossible. An image of what appeared to be a GE logo was tweeted and participants were given no more guidance than this. The trick was to recognize the wavy lines in the image as sound, then write code to reconstruct sound from the image to reveal a secret URL. Zoltan Szabo was the first to finish this brainathon in 15 days, winning $10,000 in prize money.

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

The campaign not only got some of the world’s best software engineers and data scientists to participate, it also attracted a significant amount of PR, and traffic across key markets. GEeks go for #cc9900 got the global media talking about GE as a tech company with over 19,000,000 media impressions globally. It also got the world’s top tech talent participating in the campaign with over 109,000 unique website visits (a massive number for a niche audience) from over 138 countries. Best of all, there was a 27% increase in the recruitment of coders.

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

While the world was captivated by the incredible displays of athleticism at the 2016 Rio Olympics, software engineers around the globe lost their minds over a very different competition. GEeks go for #cc9900 (that’s hexadecimal code for gold by the way) is global tech challenge created by GE to convince software engineers of its digital credentials. Zoltan Szabo was the first to complete this brainathon in 15 days, winning $10,000 and a trip to GE's Mind and Machine Conference in San Francisco.

Software engineers are a unique audience. We knew that we couldn’t talk to them through standard communication channels. Any attempt to assert our software smarts through advertising would be both wasteful and met with a combination of scepticism and incredulity, or even worse, indifference. To get the attention of software engineers and earn GE some credibility in their world, we spoke to them in the language that only they would understand – binary code. We decided to use Twitter and one of our biggest global sponsorships (the 2016 Olympic Games) to launch a global coding challenge to this very niche audience. We set a series of three increasingly difficult technical challenges and drew software engineers to the challenge with binary tweets along with irresistible banners and posters in binary code.