Tangerine Bean

Background

Tangible UK wanted to create an agency Christmas Card that created a real stir with clients and prospects. They also wanted to bring to life their new agency proposition, 'Return On Individuality'. All while proving the rebranded agency's creative credentials. And as usual, all this would have to be done in-house, to extremely tight deadlines.

Idea

Because of the company's name, colleagues had become known as Tangerines in agency parlance. This lead to the very simple germ of an idea: Tangerines are a traditional Christmas gift - so what if the agency sent one to each of their clients? So far, so so. But it's what the agency did next that makes this interesting. In order to make the cards individual and personalised, the agency cleverly inserted a foil wrapped jelly bean into each Tangerine. The colour of the jelly bean determined which festive prize the client would. So the fun and joy of the card was two-fold - receiving a traditional yet forgotten gift to raise a smile, and then the excitement of opening it to see what you've really got. But the clever part was still to come. Once they'd uncovered their jelly bean, clients had to take a picture of it with their smartphone and upload it to a specially-designed mobile site. The agency then used colour-matching technology to detect the colour of the bean and match it to the correct prize. And it worked! Unique codes were also printed on the card in case this brand new bit of coding failed, but these weren't needed. Clients were delighted and impressed, and hundreds claimed either a donation to charity, a jelly bean gift pack or a Christmas hamper.

Results

444 Tangerines were sent out and the agency received 220 jelly bean uploads - that's a 49% response rate. To put it into context, pretty much half of Tangible's clients took time out of their day to open a package, peel a Tangerine, find the jelly bean, take a picture of it, upload it to the mobile site and claim their prize. Sweet.