Fan The Flame
Issue 22 | March 2012
Agency
TBWA Brussels & Agency.com
Creative Team
Creative Director: Gert Pauwels; Design Director: Hendrik Everaerts; Art Director: Lander Janssens; Copywriters: Paul Van Oevelen, Bout Holthof
Production Team
Online Project Manager: Tine Anthoon; Digital Project Coordination: Jan Bikkembergs, Stijn Dupas; Online Strategic Planner: Rindert Dalstra; Design: Gijs Van Essche; Arduino and Burner Magic: Jan Decoster; Flash Development Front End: Ken Kools; Flash Development Logic: Diedrik Vanderemoortele; HTML/PHP Development: Geert Broeders; Motion Graphics: Annelies Eskens
Other Credits
Account Team: Benedicte Ernst, Hadoum Ghassab
Date
January 2012.
Background
Mini Belux wanted to launch their Facebook fanpage.
Since they are (very) late in the game (most of their competitors have been active on Facebook for way over a year) they wanted to get noticed quickly and get a load of ‘likes’.
Idea
‘Fan the Flame’ was an idea that connected the real and the online world.
Fans who registered on the Facebook page were given a flame. Whoever’s flame was the one that burned through the rope of the MINI Countryman really tethered to a slope at the Brussels Motor Show won the car.
Anticipating that this set-up would create quite a queue of people waiting to push the burners button, an extra feature was added. People who didn’t want to wait could challenge someone ahead of them in the line with a MINI-related trivia question. If they won the challenge, they immediately took the place of the losers.
However, to launch a challenge you needed viral points, one point rewarded for every Facebook friend you had who also participated in the game.
If you were challenged and you didn't know the answer to the trivia question, no worries, you offset the question by burning two viral points.
When you ran out of points you could acquire more by spreading the campaign link to more people on Facebook.
Results
From zero to hero, MINI Benelux got 21,314 fans in a fortnight, which doubled the target of 10,000.
That’s pretty impressive for a country of only 10 million. (MINI UK, where there’s a population of 60 million does not have six times as many Facebook fans.)
MINI ended up with more Facebook fans than Audi, BMW and Mercedes. (The objective is to overtake VW and Peugeot in the near future.)
The site attracted over 134,716 visitors and generated over half a million page views.
More impressive, the average time on site was over 8.5 minutes.
The campaign was featured on over 250 blogs, all over Europe, the US, Brazil, Japan, China and the Middle East. It also got picked up on Facebook and Twitter, becoming top trending subject in the market.
Our Thoughts
This got into Directory as a companion piece to the VW idea from Achtung Amsterdam. Both ideas are promotions and neither is particularly low-rent. It would seem the car companies involved really think it’s worth spending good money just to get people to click the ‘like’ tab.
That helps get them into all that fan’s Facebook streams and into his/her friends’ streams too so they get more traffic to their website. And more traffic means more sales. Well, to a retailer it does. Eventbrite in the UK has done the sums to show that every Facebook ‘like’ they got was worth $1.34 to them.
But can a car company measure the value of their ‘likes’? I’d love to know what a ‘like’ was worth to MINI Benelux in terms of hard income generated.
That’s the frustration with social media. We all know it works, we just don’t always know exactly how well.