One of the goals of any marketing campaign is to engage the audience and keep them watching/clicking/reading.  It's hard to do sometimes because the marketing is literally saturated with ads, gimmicks, and solicitations.  A lot of people ignore advertising and marketing.  In fact, some marketing efforts have irritated the public more than anything… on more than one occasion.  So how do you create a marketing campaign that's both functional and entertaining enough to captivate your audience?  If it's all been done before, how do you re-write the book?

MarketingSherpa presents us with a case study of what is perhaps the coolest marketing campaign I've seen in a long time that not only re-writes the book, but might even be the opening chapter in a totally new book.

General Motors/Opel Benelux was looking for one of those functionally entertaining campaigns… and they wanted a viral component to develop around it.  Viral marketing is tricky because you have to produce something that not only engages the original customer, but also has enough impact to inspire them to take the time to pass it along to someone else.  Time is valuable to people and they won't waste it on just any effort.

After careful planning and a lot of creative thinking, Opel Benelux came up with a combination email/video/telemarketing campaign that they hoped would be special enough to keep the hype around a new car going for a long time.  The first step was to build an opt-in email list of interested guinea pigs.  The company sent out an email to it's existing marketing list of 80,000 people in the Netherlands and Belgium.  The email invited recipients to participate in a "surprise event" and asked for their name and cell phone number.

Of the 80,000 messages sent, 15,000 bit and returned their name and phone number.  Those 15,000 were then sent a second email asking them to click a link to watch a video message.  When the message was viewed, participants saw a short clip of made-up characters getting blown in the face by the wind from a jet engine.  The character, who wore a lab coat and was labeled a professor, watched as two different individuals were subjected to the wind test.  The camera then focused on the clipboard he was holding.  On the clipboard were names.  The professor checked off two names on the list (presumably the people who had just been blasted in the face) and moved down to the next name.  Surprisingly, it was the name the customer provided in their initial email!  The professor then picked up a phone and dialed a number.  The customer's phone would ring and the professor would be on the line with a pre-recorded message.

The integration of systems here is amazing.  Names collected via email were inserted into a video… watching the video triggered the telemarketing dialer, which would call the customer at the exact time in the video that the professor was making his call… and then the professor from the video the customer had just watched would be on the line.  They even had contingency systems in place!  If the customer wasn't likely to be by their phone, the professor held up a sign in the video that told the customer to press "replay" when they were by their phone so he could call them.  The video paused and, once the customer had pressed "replay", would jump to the scene of the professor dialing the phone.

Customers were then given the option of passing the video along to friends and family.  If they entered names and phone numbers into the system, it automatically generated videos and telephone messages for the new customers to view as well.

Seriously… how fun does that sound?  And do you think customers are going to remember that experience?  Of course they are!

I guess you'd like to know how the campaign worked out for them, right?  The viral component definitely worked!  What started with 15,000 respondents to the initial email turned into 454,000 overall recipients.  The telemarketing dialer was making between 900 - 1200 calls an hour during the busiest part of the campaign.  The websites associated with the video received over 2 million visitors in two months and the company had an additional 12,000 people sign up for their newsletter.

All of this goes to show that a little outside the box thinking can not only pay off from a business standpoint, but it can also create a huge viral campaign.  Opel/Benelux created a marketing campaign that, as the company's Internet & CPM Manager put it, customers "will remember for the rest of their lives".

Now that's bang for the buck!