Travel Channel - Kidnap!
Issue 13 | December 2009
Agency
Rapp, New York
Creative Team
Executive Creative Directors: Camilo LaCrus, Colin Glaum, Art Directors: Tina Antonion, Ben Kirkendell, Copywriters: Dan Brill Peter Fleming Interactive Creative Directors: Rich Whalen Mark Kaplan
Other Credits
Client Service: Meg Smith, Matt Baker
Date
2009 ongoing
Background
Travel Channel wished to gain brand traction, aspiring to the sort of levels of brand engagement network channels enjoy. They did not, however, have the sort of budgets that would make it an easy task.
Idea
The challenge was in realising that to drive traffic to TravelChannel.com the last thing the audience wanted was a message about TravelChannel.com.
The solution: Kidnap!, a Facebook application that challenged users to ‘kidnap’ their friends to their favourite hideout city using a variety of methods such as ‘Eight Ball in the Sock’ or ‘Faulty Human Slingshot.’
Kidnapped players had to answer a trivia question related to the place they had been ‘abducted’ to before they could escape and kidnap friends of their own. They earned points for answering questions correctly and, the more friends they kidnapped, the higher the levels they could advance to in the game.
Facebook users are fully aware when they are being marketed to and brands must tread cautiously. For that reason, Kidnap! is not branded and the connection to Travel Channel only becomes apparent when the user is deep into the game. Even then, the experience is a positive one because the Travel Channel site acts as a tool to help the user succeed in the application.
Results
Kidnap! became the #1 branded application on Facebook and drove more traffic to the website than Google, Yahoo, and MSN combined.
To-date:
- 54% of all invitations to play have been accepted.
- Nearly 1/4billion kidnaps made.
- On average, 2 million monthly active users.
- Travel Channel became the #1 Travel Application (beating Trip Advisor).
- Kidnap! placed within the top 30 applications on Facebook (of 40,000 total).
- Kidnap! drove more traffic to the site than all the search engines combined.
A new, younger, influential audience was engaged. Two-thirds of players were aged 18-35 and 36% aged 26-35.
Our Thoughts
Using social media to build brands is a completely new advertising discipline. As the explanatory movie about this campaign says (on the directnewideas.com website) “This is the story of an application that engaged more users than anyone imagined.’
Quite so. No-one knew how successful this was going to be. When you set out in social media, you cannot predict what will happen. Moreover, the other twist is, in order to support the brand you cannot be seen to be supporting the brand.
It doesn’t get any easier being a marketer, does it?