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Draftfcb
Draftfcb is one of the largest global advertising agencies, with headquarters in
both Chicago and New York, and branch offices worldwide. London-based Draftfcb uses
FelineSoft as its digital partner.
Vauxhall Style 'Face of Tigra'
Background
Having worked with Draftfcb for their client, General Motors, on other website
projects we were the obvious digital partner for the Vauxhall Style campaign. This
campaign was to promote the Vauxhall range of small cars with a series of Vauxhall
Style catwalk events and a competition to search for the Face of Tigra 2009.
The goals
Despite a tight deadline and a strict budget, Draftfcb knew they could count on
us to pull out all the stops to hand over a quality finished product their client
would be happy with. The project involved creating the Vauxhall Style microsite
and handling the email blast for the launch of the campaign The microsite was to
include the Face of Tigra competition entry form, event details, photo galleries
and information about Vauxhall’s range of cars.
The Delivery
Having received explicit instructions from the client that the site was not to
be built in Flash, the microsite was built in asp.net and JavaScript. Key requirements
of the site included the carousel navigation, a video player for the client's commercial,
the magazine cover feature, and the entry form along with a database of the entrants'
details and photos. Tracking of all the site users' actions was also be integrated
into the microsite functionality.
To get the main navigation of the site to work as a carousel we used JavaScript
code, making sure that the non-linear functionality of how the client wanted the
carousel to work was achieved. The magazine cover feature, which had to allow the
'Face of Tigra' competition entrants to upload a picture into a magazine cover,
change the headline, preview it in a bigger size, print and send to a friend was
coded in JavaScript and C#.
Surpassing expectations
The competition entry form was required to capture and validate users' information,
and this data was then to be sorted according to the Vauxhall Style fashion catwalk
events and delivered to the client as CSV or directly loaded to an external data
management system. Though we could have easily met the requirements of the data
handling according to the client's instructions, we in fact opted to deliver a superior
solution at no extra cost by building an online database in Microsoft SQL. This
meant the client could easily get up-to-date information on how well their campaign
was going, and view the entrants' details and photos online whenever they liked.
Conclusion
Thanks to the dedication and overtime worked by our developers, we managed to deliver
the microsite with plenty of time to spare before the deadline, and delighted our
client by exceeding the specifications at no extra charge. The Vauxhall Style campaign
was a great success, with more than 1500 competition entrants via the microsite.
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PPM Hero: Building a Multi-level Online game
www.ppmhero.com
Background
The central goal of this project was to raise awareness of the client’s Project
and Portfolio Management (PPM) solution and capture details of people that are interested
in it. This is achieved through an on-line game with 3 levels based on an office
scenario using the furniture as a maze. Players have to negotiate the maze, answer
a number of multiple choice questions and avoid the Project Police who will reduce
the budget if bumped into. The questions in the game are focused around IT, project
management and other topics surrounding the PPM product.
Delivery
The PPMhero site consists of some .aspx pages and a flash game which interacts
with the site by submitting scores to the leader board and loading up questions
that users of the site can submit. A built-in question manager, which is a web-based
interface for managing the questions in the game and co-worker incidents, makes
it quick and simple to manage the questions in the game. A management area of the
site was also built in so the client can control all of the games functionality.
Conclusion
The design work was all created and supplied by Draftfcb, and the finished game
was skinned so that the original designs were strictly adhered to. Thanks to the
skills and experience of our project management and software development teams,
the production deadlines were all met, with plenty of time to spare and the client
is so delighted with the results that they are considering publishing further versions
of the game in different languages.
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Xmas campaign gaming microsite
The Problem
We were approached by Draftfcb agency about helping out on a critical project about
a month before Xmas that year. With the project time line at 80% and the completed
programming at only 30% they were in real danger of failing to deliver the project
at all. The project involved a PS3 game which was set to go on sale for the main
Xmas shopping season and was backed by a huge global marketing campaign yet the
launch of the online game microsite, an integral part of the campaign, was critically
delayed.
Delivery
FelineSoft were asked to step in and take control of the development of the game
microsite two weeks before the marketing campaign was due to launch. This was an
unusual scenario for us as all our other development work was booked in weeks ahead
and tightly project-managed. However, our development team had all the necessary
skill sets to successfully complete the project and they were game for some over-time
so we took on the challenge.
Completing the online game microsite required working in SQL server, ASP.net, and
Flash; integration with Google maps was also a key requirement. Perhaps not surprisingly
given the steep learning curve we had to overcome by taking on a project half-way
through, we missed the original project's deadline by three days, but most crucially
we did deliver the completed project three days before the global marketing campaign
launched.
Conclusion
Despite the last-minute nature of this project we were proud to step in and deliver
what was needed. The game was marketed in 26 different countries, and the online
game microsite attracted 450,000 game players in 3 months. In short, everyone was
a winner!
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Dad Dancing Microsite with YouTube integration
As one of Draftfcb’s trusted technical partners, we were tasked with the build of the ‘Dad Dancing’ microsite. The aim of the campaign was to boost traffic to the Jamaican Tourist Board website from families with teenagers and increase holiday booking enquiries. The Dad Dancing microsite enabled teenagers to upload videos of their dad dancing and enter their dad into the competition to win a week of dance rehab in Jamaica, accompanied by three other family members, all staying in a luxury resort.
The Challenge
The strategy was to offer up Jamaica’s unique rhythm and vibe to help transform their dads from socially embarrassing dancing individuals to vaguely cool exponents of the dance floor. This has to be done in an entertaining way that enabled the whole family to get involved and talking about Jamaica, all on a very limited budget. We wanted to bring to life the campaign proposition: Jamaica’s natural vibe can help make parents less embarrassing.
The Delivery
The Dad Dancing microsite needed to be integrated with the YouTube API; we created a custom skin and customised the YouTube player API to make it chromeless (enabling the player to create their own controls). Once we had the HTML and JavaScript coding of the site itself, we finished the skinning and integrated the Google tracking code so that the success of the site could be monitored easily.
Draftfcb produced a short film of badly dancing Dads against a specially composed music track which would help explain the competition and illustrate the problem that middle-aged dads habitually have. This was seeded on teen and mum’s sites, other social networks such as Twitter and FaceBook. The site was also featured on the Virgin Holidays website and YouTube but soon became shared via the blogosphere with even the National Health Service recommending it as beneficial exercise for older men.
Conclusion
Having worked with Draftfcb on numerous campaigns, they knew we had all the processes in place to tightly project manage the website build and keep costs to budget. The campaign was successful against a number of criteria:
- 125, 071 plays of the viral video were achieved through a seeding campaign
- Plus there have been an additional 6,933 visits to the site generating 22,229 page views
- The average time users spent on the site was 1:38 minutes.
- The number of video entries on the site was 22 and they were viewed in total 43,146 times
- It was shared widely on the blogosphere (whinydad.blogspot.com, friendfeed.com
- In addition to this, both The Sun newspaper did an online feature on the campaign directing people to the dad dancing site (www.totallydaddancing.com) and, at the other extreme, the NHS featured it on one of their local sites recommending Dads dancing as a beneficial exercise for older men.
- Finally, booking enquiries were up 40% year on year – all for just £16,000
totallydaddancing.co.uk
To see the case study written up by Draftfcb’s marketing director Laura Holme read on here.