The Promise Keeper
Issue 19 | June 2011
Agency
Forsman & Bodenfors
Creative Team
Art director: Adam Ulvegärde; Copywriter: Robert Lund; Designer: Christoffer Persson
Production Team
Agency producer: Lina Strandäng; Digital producer: Eva Råberg ; Digital technologist: Stefan Thomson; Production company: Rebenga, Mad In Sweden; Director: Marcus Svanberg/Acne; Producer: Kalle Schröder/Acne
Other Credits
Account director: Hans Andersson; Account managers: Karin Apelskog, Anneli Kjellander
Date
March 2011-ongoing
Background
Reebok wanted to launch its new running shoe, the ZigTech, to a target audience of people who are interested in running but who aren’t hardcore runners. The campaign needed to be interactive and to start a series of conversations around the Reebok brand.
Idea
The trouble with being an occasional runner is you may have good intentions but often you can always find other things to do than go out and pound the streets for a few miles.
The insight behind this campaign, then, was that a promise to everyone you know is more important than a promise you make only to yourself. The ‘Promise Keeper’ was the first online application that actually got you to go out and run by making you keep your word.
Every run you promise to do gets automatically posted on the social network of your choice so your friends can see. If you do (or don’t) run, they get notified.
Every update shows the new shoe and is personal and starts your friends chatting with you and with themselves about running.
The campaign launched by making videos of sports stars talking in short video films directly to people who had made promises through the app, encouraging them or mocking them, depending on whether they had run or not.
Results
The campaign has only just launched.
Our Thoughts
The last time I looked at the numbers, there were 4 times as many mobile phones in the world as there were computers and 2.5 times as many mobiles as landline phones. The number of people with a mobile is equal to 60% of the world’s population. No other gadget has been so universally taken up because it’s a platform that brings you music, entertainment, information and even the means to pay your bills. It is also the lightning rod of friendship and few understand this better than Forsman & Bodenfors. It helps that you have 100MB of connectivity pretty much wherever you go in Sweden. But this app is more than just technology harnessed, it has a proper advertising insight behind it, to wit that most of us are makers of pie-crust promises. The potential for mobile communications hasn’t really been clearly understood, I think, but apps like this show clearly that the battle for people’s hearts and minds is moving into their pockets.