Help the Oversharers

Background

Pringles wanted impatient, frenetic 16-24-year-olds who thought the brand was uncool to reconsider their opinions.

The insight was that these young people are all avid social media ‘sharers’ and Pringles are all about sharing too. From this emerged the question, could Pringles help them share even more?

The only trouble was, there is already too much inane tosh being shared online. Most of it is beyond the need to know. It is ‘overshared’ information.

This observation led the team to wonder what would happen if they gave teenagers the chance to help friends stop sharing so much? To start sharing only the things actually worth sharing, like Pringles?

Idea

The campaign was launched on Facebook, the epicentre of oversharing, with some unique Facebook functionality. People who downloaded the Pringles plugin, when they saw a friend’s silly status, just needed to click the Overshare button. This generated a customisable message that directed the friend to the ‘Help the Oversharers’ website (www.helptheoversharers.com) to play around with more cool content.

A unique, interactive video allowed visitors to plaster their friends’ greatest Facebook ‘overshares’ across virtual advertising displays in London, then send them the video as a cheeky reminder of their oversharing.

In short, it was a clever way to stop teenagers in their tracks. The funniest and most ridiculous overshares that were contributed via Twitter were fed into digital outdoor media across London and into targeted online media.

Results

Within hours of going live the campaign was being featured in blogs, tweets and websites

The plugin was downloaded nearly 700 times in the first 48 hours alone. There were 700+ ‘likes’ on Facebook in the first few hours of launch

There was a 350% increase in unique visitors to the site following outdoor and online media placements with an above average click-through rate for targeted expandable banners of over 0.5% achieved

Up to 64% of site visitors shared videos, spending on average a good 7+ minutes interacting with the brand on the video pages

Our Thoughts

Interconnected media is suddenly with us and it is giving consumers an active role to play in our campaigns. T-Mobile in Slovenia handed over its advertising sites, including their TV and radio spots, to their subscribers to use as they chose and now here’s Pringles getting teenagers the chance to poke their friends in very public places. Outdoor is perhaps the most exciting of all media now it has gone digital, because it is giving control of the message over to the brand’s fans. In so doing it generates more chat online, more recognition of the idea, more interest in the brand.

This idea from Wunderman is more innovative than anything we’ve seen from their sibling in Greater London House, ad agency RKCR.