Robinson Cursor Club
Issue 15 | June 2010
Agency
Scholz & Friends Hamburg
Creative Team
Executive Creative Director: Matthias Schmidt, Stefan Setzkom; Creative Director: Markus Daubenbuechel; Art Director: Desiree Rose; Copywriter: Judith Preker; Graphics: Hilke Hartmann, Lars Leber
Production Team
Production Company: Barbecue Mediendesign GmbH
Other Credits
Concept: Arno Selhorst, Nestor Gabriel, Sierralta Espinoza, Kathrin Stahl; Account Manager: Katja Noack, Ingo Schueehle; Programmer: Marcel Stroeter, Daniel Pramel
Date
1st April 2010
Background
The task was to develop a cost-effective dialogue marketing tool that would make the advantages of the Robinson Club particularly clear, encouraging people to make holiday bookings.
Idea
Via the regular Robinson newsletter and on a special website, readers were made this special offer: ‘Send your cursor on holiday – after all, it works just as hard as you do. Let it send back reports on what a Robinson holiday is really like. And while it’s away, we’ll give you a stand-in to use.’
Those who clicked on the offer were taken to a Robinson website that looked exactly like the one for normal holidaymakers but pixellated and showing cursors having a great time rather than images of people.
Visitors could book their cursor a holiday (free, of course), choose a holiday stand-in cursor (downloading a small app to their computers) and send their original cursor off. Users got regular holiday mail from the cursor, which was shown on the beach, in the pool or on the piste, before it returned to their desktops a week later, brown as a berry.
Results
These repeated playful reminders of the joys of Robinson Clubs turned out to be a tremendous success, leading to an enormous increase in traffic to the website. The average monthly visit rate of 190,000 visitors was doubled while no fewer than 54,680 cursors were sent on holiday. At a financial outlay of less than €10,000, this is was equivalent to €0.18 per customer.
Our Thoughts
Every now and then you see an idea you know you could never have come up with yourself and, for me, this is one of those. It is, simply, completely bonkers. But absolutely wonderful. For a full seven days, Robinsons was able to talk to over 50,000 people about their Clubs, making them pine for sun and sea (or snow in some cases). This is where reading awards submissions can be frustrating because my bet is this campaign would have led to a significant uplift in holidays sold, with a return on investment in the region of 1: 10, far higher than travel industry norms and a great argument for ROI, meaning return on idea. I wish we could see those numbers, though I guess (grudgingly) I can see why some clients like to keep them to themselves.