2010 Winners & Shortlists

The Brief

We had to convince a cynical youth market to participate in yet another consumer promotion offering. What's more many promotions in the region use electronic goods as incentives – making the prize offering somewhat “same same” and uninspiring to participate, particularly for a fickle youth market, where even though they want to be part of cool trends, they crave individuality and freedom of expression. To overcome the “whatever” attitude, we gave control back to our audience. How? We gave them freedom of choice. We had no benchmarks for this type of online activity, as it was the very first time Mars Ice Cream had ever engaged its audience with an online participative promotion.

Creative Execution

Other “customizing” online promotions had been done, BUT this was a first in the region to offer 160 prizes, freedom of choice, personalization and multiple entries without being sales linked. The activity dovetailed with the brands' positioning of “Your favorite chill” as a great chill-time experience. Being online, it was perfect, especially in summer when being indoors is mandatory. Offline and online advertising drove traffic. Weekly emails encouraged participants to enter repeatedly and showed off the best funk up designs of the week. Whilst the campaign spread virally by people being able to post their funked prizes on Facebook.

Describe the creative solution to the brief/objective.

Focusing on the key strategy drivers – choice and individuality, we formed the creative platform calling it “Funk up your Prize”. We let participants choose what they wanted to win and allowed them to personalize it, thus making each prize entry their own unique piece of art. And we also let them funk up a new prize every day. On the microsite, we had Mars, Snickers & Twix Ice-cream design studios which had palettes of images, tools and colors to inspire dreams of creativity. Then we literally made their dream come true, by printing their design on the prize they won!

Results

The results prove that our audience loved the experience and more-so it showed the power of choice and originality were key incentives for participation. The numbers speak for themselves. 165,316 Unique visitors 18,258 entrants. An 11% conversion of all unique visits. A staggering 44,260 funked up prizes. A 29% conversion on all visits. And 160 very unique prizes that are being shown off by their owners!