This is a case study for the post Communication in the ‘Age of Recommendation’.

TfL wanted to make both driver and cyclists realise how difficult it is for drivers to see cyclists.  In order to encourage both groups to see or been seen, a powerful film was created to run on TV.  The London-only TV campaign (and supporting press) had a very limited budget and, therefore, agency WCRS were asked to use digital to lengthen and amplify the campaign.  The agency knew that social media and recommendation could do just this.

Experts – bloggers specialising in cycling and motoring were approached to get them to spread the word and post the video.
 
Interest Groups – WCRS joined London cyclist / motoring groups on Facebook and uploaded the video.

Popularity Charts – SEO techniques were used to increase the likely views of the film on video sharing sites as well as encouraging and enabling promotion of the video on social bookmarking & news aggregation sites, such as delicious & digg.
 
All of this was done without giving the game away!  Key terms, such as “moonwalking bear”, couldn’t be optimised, for example!

After only 2 weeks, (until March 26th, 2008) the ad had received a total of 4.4million views, including: 

From Popularity charts

• 2.9 million views on YouTube & other video sharing sites with over 1,500 comments
• It was 6th most viewed YouTube film (in March) in the UK and 1st most viewed in its category (How to & Style) in both the UK and globally. 
• million views on dothetest.co.uk driven by social bookmarking sites

From Experts seeding

• 5,092 views driven from niche cycling/motoring blogs
• The film had circa 34,000 results on Google and over 1,400 blog mentions (source: Technorati)

From Interest groups

• 11,630 views from groups & profiles on Facebook: 4 fan groups

It is estimated that the TV campaign directly delivered 5.92m views.  It, alongside the press campaign, drove 400,000 online views (based on the first week’s visits).  The social media activity then amplified this, delivering another 4m views.  This meant Tfl got around £140,000 worth of views for £20,000, delivering a saving of £120,000 and an ROI of 600%.

This is a case study for the original post Communication in the ‘Age of Recommendation’.

With thanks to Laurence Parkes, Head of Digital @ WCRS

The objective of this campaign was to re-engage a young male audience with the new B Range. WCRS came up with the idea of “Effortless Cool” and had a TV script showing a Brylcreem user showing their cool by doing really cool tricks (skateboarding, magic, etc.) effortlessly. In order to create even greater engagement, we decided to run an on-line competition to cast the hero of the ad and the music track to be used. The competition was hosted on Myspace. This was, in itself, an “engagement agent”. But we used further agents to create interest in the competition;

Experts – we approached bloggers in extreme football, magic, street basketball, etc. to get them to write about the competition and drum up interest in it.

Interest Groups – we joined discussion forums and Facebook pages around interests like pen spinning (yes, they exist!) and talked about the competition. Using a channel on YouTube we engaged with these groups by building up lists of our favourite videos.

Popularity Charts – we used SEO to increase the likelihood of the finished ad being found on sites like YouTube, whilst engaging in an old-style media campaign, but with the new media channel that is StumbleUpon.

In all of these types of agents, we gradually released content (including recent entries) to pique interest and build momentum. We created our own blog on Myspace to discuss how the competition was developing.

For only £40k we had 1,208 music entries and 194 video entries. We also had 115,000 views of the top 5 video entries alone.