Online Rehab in Canada
Travel Alberta
Issue 34 | March 2015
Agency
Eigen Fabrikaat
Creative Team
Copy Jasper Symons Art Thomas Nieuwenhuizen Creative Director Peter Scholtens
Production Team
Production Build in Amsterdam Digital Design Daan Klaver Digital Producer Tim Weers Film production Dennis Lubbers Productions
Other Credits
Account Manager Rik Vandewall Project Manager Iris Veenstra Art Buyer Ivette Stokkel
Date
September 2014
Background
The Canadian province of Alberta offered brilliant winter-sports vacations in breathtaking scenery. KLM flew to Calgary, making Alberta easily accessible for Dutch skiing enthusiasts, which was why Travel Alberta wanted to run an online awareness campaign.
Idea
Winter in Canada was so spectacular that visitors truly forget about everything and everyone. This was a place where it was easy to go 100% offline. And that was something the Dutch needed because they were online all the time, checking their smartphones as often as 150 times a day.
The target group was invited to take a test on Facebook, where they were most active, to assess their online lives: the Online Rehab.
Whoever turned out to be the most online- obsessive, smartphone addict would win 10 totally offline days in Canada.
The Online Rehab measured the number of Facebook friends every visitor had; the number of posts and likes made and whether they checked out where and what their friends were up to.
To amplify the idea, a Wi-Fi Hunt was set up. At lunchtime, people looking for free Wi-Fi were served messages in their Network Preferences tab telling them they could go online at the florist's. Once they got there, they were shunted on to another spot, then a third, fourth, fifth, sixth. If they made it all the way to this last place, a small cafe´, they were in serious need of a break.
Results
More than 15,000 people did the test, some several times, which in itself was an insight into Dutch addiction to the internet.
In total there were 15,247 unique participants, who spent an average of 2 minutes and 22 seconds engaged.
Travel Alberta's Facebook community grew by 31%. There were 77,658 likes posted, 5,859 comments, 3,462 shares, 128,363 video plays.
There was an uplift in sales of winter holidays to Alberta of over 30%.
Our Thoughts
Early in the year, many of the trend- spotters identified 2015 as the year in which marketers learned to deal with the always-on, mobile-connected consumer. And here we have evidence of it but expressed with typical Dutch contrariness. If you're always on, switch off. This is an organisation demonstrating its awareness of the changing context modern life and in so doing making itself a relevant and responsive brand.