Vodaphone

Friday Inspiration. Vodafone “Surprise”.

I’m not bypassing Thanksgiving, but for some reason I’m in a very Christmas mood this morning when it comes to inspiration. While surfing around the internet this morning checking out Christmas related videos I came across this beautiful looking piece for Vodaphone Ireland.

The character design is beautiful, and the animation and 3D set design is really outstanding. Directed by Nexus Productions FX Goby, and created by Grey London this spot tells the story of a young reindeer coming home for Christmas. His mother plotts a surprise party with all of his forest friends to welcome him home.

The animation brings the characters to life and the perfect amount of humanity and warmth that they need to sell the holiday feeling, ll done with a few light hearted touches of humor. Like the piece for John Lewis, Vodaphone isn’t trying to sell me a product for Christmas. They are simply telling a story about one of the things that makes the season great. The brand reinforcement is secondary to the message, and that is a winner for me.

10,000 SIM Cards for 100,000 Likes.

The first video, shows a really nice stop motion video that Vodafone Ireland created to celebrate 100,000 likes on Facebook. The video is constructed from more than 10,000 SIM cards, and has a really nice flow to it. Whats more impressive though, is the second video that shows how they made it. If you think this kind of thing looks easy, watch video number two. It’ll change your mind.

Vodaphone “Pixel Hunt”. Winning!

Sometimes a advertising campaign with the simplest audience engagement can generate the best results. A great example of this is Vodaphone’s “Pixel Hunt” game created by Jung Von Matt/Alster. The game was designed to promote the new LG Optimus phone and its 5 megapixel camera in Germany. Game play is simple, you click on pixels to eliminate them, and if you are lucky you could instantly win one of one hundred phones hidden behind a pixel in the image.

In one month, all 5 million pixels were clicked out by over 300 thousand participants that signed into the site to play. That is some pretty serious usage, that was generated with minimal promotion, and viral spread.

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Who Killed Summer, Vodaphone Viral Campaign

This is a great example of how to do a social media led advertising campaign. Vodaphone’s “Who Killed Summer.”

The concept is that you can follow a bunch of contestants across Europe through a 9 week stint of parties and raves. The last one contestant standing after this 2 month party binge, and the one that can hunt down the biggest celebrities wins. What Vodaphone didn’t tell the contestants though was: as time goes on, they actually have to work for Vodafone to organize the parties they are going to attend. The whole campaign becomes a reality show featured on the youtube channel.

the campaign is described as,

“Who Killed Summer? is a groundbreaking multi-platform drama set against the backdrop of an online reality show.”

Strategically, this seems like fairly well thought-through and planned campaign in terms of its awareness and reach. The target audience relevance, and the multi-platform spread ( Youtube being present on so many mobile devices, net connected boxes, as well as your PC). Overall the content, drama, and everything else come together. Here is the downside. At this time the Youtube channel has only gotten 400+ views so far. This might be due to a lack of user participation elements. With out audience interaction, it’s hard for this to compete with actual reality shows. They might have had a higher view level, if they had shot 3 to 6 pilot episodes that ran like infomercials in Europe. Hook your audience with what looks and acts like passive TV content with linkages to more in depth content on the Youtube channel Etc.

So far, the site traffic rank is around 30,000 in the UK, and 90,000 in Germany. According to the viral video network, the average time on site is under 2 minutes. 40% of traffic comes from and goes to facebook and twitter.