Stand Up Marathon
Matting
Issue 37 | December 2015
Agency
Mecka
Creative Team
Art Director Sami Nietula Copywriter Fredrik Kirkfjell Layout Emma Tyrén Film/photo Tobias Davidov
Production Team
Developer Andreas Gotfredsen Project Manager Lotta Cabrera Persson Strategy Mats Alfredsson
Date
Ongoing
Background
Matting was a Swedish office supplies company. Among the many products they marketed were ergonomic StandUp! mats. These helped distribute the weight of the person standing on them to make it less fatiguing to stand.
At a time when office work was becoming increasingly sedentary, StandUp! Mats could help white-collar workers lower the risks of obesity and diabetes. By standing up at their desks, their bodies burnt off calories. In fact, any office worker standing up for three hours a day throughout the year burned off the same number of calories as running ten marathons.
Idea
Taking advantage of a trend for runners to use various apps to track their progress and share their success, the idea was to create an app that did exactly the same but for standing.
The StandUp marathon was a virtual marathon. Players created an account via Facebook and from that moment the app kept track of how often and how long they were standing. The calories burned were mapped against the calories burned running a marathon round the streets of New York.
Players followed their avatar via Google Maps across ten stages. As they started a new stage, they could unlock entertaining facts about that part of New York as well as information about exercise, health and the benefits of standing.
Racers had the chance to win a trip to New York for real if they bought a mat and registered it.
Results
During its first three months, the site registered 30,597 standing sessions and the number of users continued to grow. Just like the sales of the anti-fatigue mat. Sales were up 414% y.o.y. surpassing the target set by 314% delivering ROI of 400%.
This was achieved on a media budget of just 20,000 SEK (€2000).
Our Thoughts
Well, you learn something new every day! Standing is as good for you as running!
The neat part of this idea is the insight that the target audience is likely to be into all those performance apps and would appreciate the irony of an app that tracked them doing almost nothing. Gamification really does work when it turns something relatively serious (your health) into something playful and shareable.