March 2009 Awesome Ad Campaign Precis - 15 Minutes of Cross Media Madness

29th March 2009 - Stephen Neate, My Sunshine Coast

Back in February 2009, the team from My Sunshine Coast sat down with Mike Middleton of On-Camera to discuss some ideas for a series of upcoming TV ads.  Little did we know that over a few coffees, a great salad sandwich, a lot of talking and a white board full of ideas that the result would be a unique TV campaign that has never been done before *.  The reason for the TV ads in the first place was to assist in pushing the buzz about the My Sunshine Coast website, from one medium into another so that we can attract new visitors to the website.  For those that don't know the number of visitors and the number of pages they view on your website is the ultimate goal of any site and the only true indicator of successful site traffic. (as an aside Hits is a term that is used often but does not relate directly to the number of actual visitors as 1 visitor can easily equate to 50+ hits per page visited)  

Another point we wanted to address was kind of like releasing our own 'Stimulus Package' as we are sick to death of hearing in the media that the economy has gone to the dogs.  It hasn't, and we wanted to prove to our advertisers that we are serious about our point of view and that new business can always be generated, irrespective of what the media is telling us.  (yes its little ironic as we are considered media by many companies/visitors as well)

The idea, like all the best ones, is quite simple in application.  Using TV as the medium to direct viewers to our website, to go into a competition to win prizes.  Nothing new in that concept, lots of companies of all sizes encourage people to visit their website to interact with them and / or win things, right?  What we have done that is different is put a REAL time frame on this promotion.  From the moment our little 15 second ad runs, TV viewers have 15 minutes to leave the comfort of their lounge, go online and enter into our prize draws.  Sounded like a great idea when we were doing story board concepts, although there was a nagging doubt being "what if people just don't get it? ".  Pushing that doubt aside, and putting faith in the fact that people are naturally curious we decided to go ahead and put this concept into reality.

Once the euphoria of this unique idea died down, we realised a very important fact about what we were about to do.  We would truly be able to quantify the responses with such a limited time period to the advertised audience, and to some degree of accuracy judge and understand the effectiveness of advertising on the TV for our medium.  

My Sunshine Coast is lucky to also own, and have the services available of the web development team at Subtle Difference to manage all things web related.  Which means at a moments notice we can call upon state of the art expertise for any of the demanding requirements that a large portal requires.  Putting this idea into reality had its own unique demands, not the least being "how to handle so many people visiting the website at the same time", then there is of course making sense of all the statistics gathered.

Well we got past the why and how with our new unique idea, although we still needed the what.  In our case this was "what can we give away" to this new audience!  Early on during this process it was decided that all giveaways would be carefully monitored to be absolutely "no strings attached" so that a winner did actually win something not just the opportunity to value ad a purchase with a selected company.  I would like to point out some of the "with strings" giveaways we were offered and couldn't use were astounding like free house designs with a new land purchase valued in the thousands.  Our current advertisers were asked to be involved with this TV campaign on the basis that we only needed a "giveaway" from their company, as a service, product or both.  There was no other charge to these companies to be involved! (we did have to explain that lot, "yes that is right there is no charge apart from your giveaway").

In under a month we had raised over $50,000 in giveaways (hence the name of the giveaway) with the total figure being an amazing $56,646.00 with around 470 individual prizes on offer.  We were impressed, blown away, by the support our current advertisers were able to commit to, especially with such a unique never tried before idea.  Might be something to say about the current times with businesses willing to give things a go, especially to get new business, some were naturally curious about how this would work, although the no dollars out of pocket to get involved sure must have helped. 

With the creative for the 15 Second ad done in a retro style to stand out from other ads on TV (view this video) that only left us with the technical side of how this was to work.  Technically speaking the code on the website had to be time synched with Chanel 7, and had to have the ability to pop up on site to any viewer browsing the website whilst the ads were on.  From a strictly code perspective, it is a mashup of technologies including JavaScript, x(HTML), PHP with careful application so as to make the minimum footprint on the server or database.  We had to take into account hundreds of concurrent visitors per second instead as opposed to our usual of thousands of visitors per day.  Simply put it was both challenging and fun, more tech specs below if you are interested.  You can view how this worked online here with this little 1 minute video.   

What we didn't take into account in our planning initially was the accuracy required by Channel 7 for the timings of these ads.  Thats when we really knew this was a unique campaign as the TV station was unable to give us firm down to the minute / second advertising times.  Initially the times given were out by up to 14 minutes, meaning that someone had to watch the ad breaks to make sure that the internet giveaways did fire off at the correct time (in this case that was me).  What we found out is that the ad breaks for regional TV are also dictated by Brisbane and ultimately by Melbourne for timings with National Advertisers able to squeeze ads in and push ours out of the schedule.  Not that the ads wouldn't run, just that they may run at the next ad break some 11 minutes later (although still within the purchased time slot), so some work was required.  With help from the regional staff at Channel 7 the timings for our 15 second ad were able to be fine tuned to within a 1-3 minute accuracy, although we did need to pull out of advertising during Live Sport.  Those times couldn't be predicated due to the nature of the Live showings.  Luckily for us, our fantastic account manager (Kim Jarott and in her absence Terri-Ann Campisi) were able to make changes to placement up to a few hours before delivery, which combined with our coding enabled us to be flexible with our TV advertising. 

So in summary what did we learn....   

We know that people are curious when given something a little different, thousands of people entered 10's of thousands of prize draws with hundreds and hundreds of winners during the month of March.  Additionally with changing the timings of our ads, we could ascertain what time slots, exactly, worked for our industry and the TV audience.  With asking for only a couple of personal questions (age, gender, location etc...) we were encouraged to learn that people from all over the Coast (Bribie Island to Gympie) were watching our ads, and that handful of people of real world experience (74 + years) are hooked into these modern times as they are also entering our prize draws. 

Best of all, our visitor traffic has soared this month, and our advertisers agree with these statistics and love how this promotion has worked.  The feedback from advertisers and their winners has been great, with many asking us when the next promotion like this is running already.  

Will we run this again?  Absolutely it has been fun, just make sure you visit our site or join our newsletter (yes that is a shameless plug) so that you don't miss out.   

NOTES:
*  Let me clarify the uniqueness, after careful research it was found that nobody in Queensland, and potentially nobody in Australia and possibly nobody Internationally has tried this before.  This is from our media team at On-Camera, and in consultation with Channel 7, additionally we have asked other media people/companies to ascertain this fact.  If you do know of the same ads running on TV that are time synched to a website please get in contact with us, we would love to hear about it. 
** Tech specs.  If you would like to learn more about the technical aspect and coding of this ad please contact Stephen Neate at Subtle Difference.
*** Would you like to learn about how your company could run an interactive TV and Website campaign ?  Please contact Mike Middleton at On-Camera for information.
**** View winners of this competition
***** Terms and conditions for this competition