Orange Balloon Race (Balloonacy)
Orange UK
Issue 8 | September 2008
Agency
Poke
Creative Team
Iain Tait, Andrew Zolty - Concept;Lise Lauritzen - Planner;Marc Davies, Nicky Gibson, Dickon Langdon - Design;David Cadji-Newby - Copy;Derek McKenna, Caroline Butterworth - Interface
Production Team
Nilesh Ashra, Mattias Gunneras, Greg Reed - Development
Other Credits
Igor Clark, Mike Pearson - Management
Date
June 2008
Background
The umbrella Orange Animals Pay As You Go campaign uses Orange Animal shaped balloons to represent the packages available, based on different types of consumer behaviour. The company wanted to promote the launch of Orange's Animal tariffs, using the iconic designs in the digital space in an innovative way.
Idea
Poke London came up with the idea of the world’s first ever internet balloon race. The one week Orange Balloon Race challenged people to fly their own personalised balloon (styled after one of the four Orange animal shapes) across a network of more than 1,500 selected websites including Yahoo! and thesun.co.uk. The contestant who travelled the furthest distance stood the chance of winning a luxury seven night holiday for themselves and seven friends in Ibiza.
Contestants began from the same starting point - the Balloon Race home page at www.playballoonacy.com – then had to race their balloons across a series of familiar websites, boosting their balloon as they went to make it travel faster. Every page that the balloon travelled across earned the player one internet mile. Powering the balloon were user-friendly controls that popped-up on screen and allowed players to track their progress. Players were also able to enlist the help of friends to boost their balloons, using tools built for social networking sites including Bebo, Facebook and MySpace.
Results
More than 30,000 balloons took part in the race, and the winner was one Reginald Ringtail the Raccoon with 5033 internet miles.
Our Thoughts
The digerati were talking about this campaign as being technically very impressive. Daniele Fiandaca, CEO of Profero, Europe, even had a balloon up there though I don’t think he did that well.