M&M’s Find Red
Issue 18 | March 2011
Agency
Proximity Canada
Creative Team
John Gagne, Rene Rouleau, Jeffrey Da Silva, Jonathan Ruby, Ari Elkouby, Jeff Vermeersch, Ryan Lawrence
Production Team
Soft Citizen, Topix
Other Credits
Associate Technical Director: Darrin Patey; Account Director: Priyanka Goswami; Planner: Collin Douma; Agency PR: Shari Balga; Senior Project Manager: Joanne Sincich; Developer: Iftikhar Ahmed; Information Architect: Patrick Jordan; Planner: Collin Douma; Agency PR: Shari Balga; Account Co-ordinator: Jesse Abrams; Vice President/Account Director: Chris Perron; Account Director: Patty Moher
Date
November – December 2010
Background
Mars Canada wanted to drive awareness of M&M’s online by delivering the brand benefit of ‘irresistible fun’. They heard the Google Street View car was coming to Toronto. And had an idea.
Idea
The back story was told in a YouTube video of how the red M&M’s character (called Red) got sucked by accident into Google Street View.
All players had to do was to find Red somewhere in Toronto somewhere in Google Street View.
A simple treasure hunt, this was the first to use Google Street View with players competing to win a suitably fun, suitably streetwise Smart car. Red, of course.
Over four weeks, players got clues on the website, on Twitter and on Facebook. In the real world, there were QR code wild postings to unlock clues, and package upc codes to unlock yet more clues through StickyBits. And Red’s foursquare checkins also led players closer to the hidden locations. There were even clues hidden in the original YouTube video.
Apart from the QR posters, there was no bought media whatsoever. Yet within 4 weeks, findred.ca was getting blogged, tweeted and Facebooked. Even local celebrities shared their joy of the game. National and international media coverage also praised the work.
The online game, like the brand, truly was ‘irresistible fun’. Though it could only be won by Canadians, this didn’t stop people around the world from playing.
Results
The average time spent on the site was over 19 minutes. That’s four times the industry average. And in just 30 days, M&M’s ‘Find Red’ also got 8.4 million PR impressions, over 7 million QR Code poster views and over 225,000 Twitter impressions. Total impressions came out to over 15.6 million.
Our Thoughts
I have talked elsewhere about the rise and rise of what David Harris calls the ‘creek’, the creative geek, and this is another idea in which a whole bunch of people with completely different skills would have had to collaborate to make it happen. Someone would have had to have the original communication idea, (‘Hey, wouldn’t it be ‘irresistible fun’ if we hid a red M&M’s in Google Street View at the very moment Google Street View is new and interesting?’) but it needed a team of people both inside the agency and at Google to work out how that could happen and to make the experience both challenging yet enjoyable.
Doing anything for the first time is never easy – but enormously satisfying!