Menu
Online & Digital
 

TenGrandisBuriedHere.com

Issue 14 | March 2010

Agency

Wunderman Sydney

Creative Team

Creative Director: Matt Batten, Copywriter: Theodora Gerakiteys, Head of Copy: Jason Stubbs

Production Team

Designers: Terry Hibbert, James Britt, Digital Producer: Jo Durant,

Other Credits

Digital Strategist: Camilla Cooke, Planner: Anu Mohan

Date

September 2009

Background

Microsoft’s share in the browser market in Australia had declined. The launch of their new Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) was a chance to arrest this trend. The brief was to support the launch of IE8 with a target of 5,000 downloads. Users of competing products like Safari and Firefox (called Fanboys) were highly brand loyal, and highly critical of Microsoft, typically greeting new Microsoft products with cynicism and criticism. On top of this, because the product was a free download, the budget was tiny. The $15,000 budget could not afford any paid media at all so the campaign was going to have to exist solely in social media.

Idea

Burying $10,000 on the internet and challenging people to find it was a world-first. The entire campaign lived in social media. Not a single cent was spent on bought media. To find the cash, players had to  download IE8 then follow

Twitter@TenGrand_IE8 for daily clues. Using the product to search the net, players had to solve cryptic clues to find the right URL and crack the password. The first one to do this won the $10,000.

News of ‘buried treasure’ was released through bloggers and quickly snowballed to feature on hundreds of blogs around the world. Twitter CEO, Evan Williams, even tweeted about it to his 934,000 followers.

Results

To solve clues, players banded together to create one of the longest-running community forums ever on the world’s largest IT blog, Whirlpool.net. This forum eventually contained over 150 pages of 5,000+ individual contributions.

More importantly, participants were engaged in using the product for several hours every single day for nearly two months.

Over 300% of target was achieved (at least 15,000 IE8 downloads) without spending a single dollar on bought media.

www.tengrandisburiedhere.com attracted over 90,000 unique visitors, with over 32,000 on one day alone. 21% were using IE6 or 7 and could upgrade, while 72%, using competitive browsers, were encouraged to switch to IE8.

Our Thoughts

All the statistics show that word-of-mouth recommendation is the most powerful form of advertising of all. And that’s what Twitter is, word-of-mouth advertising.

In some ways this is the oldest idea in the hills, a treasure hunt, but made to work in a new-ish media space. For me, the intriguing thing about the campaign is how the the players all wanted to share their information. Cracking the problem was the goal, not winning the money. Now that really is an insight into the way people behave online because, I suspect, they wouldn’t be nearly so collaborative offline.

Related Articles