Watch the spot that promotes the experience! Above spot is for contextual purposes only, produced by my ultra-talented coworker, Maggie Weishaar. Scroll for details of how I contributed.
making GEICO go viral.
When GEICO and Funko partnered together to giveaway over 60,000 free Gecko Funko Pops, we built a premium web experience engineered to engage users and play quickly (and, users could play daily for the entire month).
A simulated win of a Glow-in-the-Dark Gecko Funko Pop.
If you weren’t lucky enough to win an actual Funko, we awarded you with a silly digital prize.
To reduce fraudulent wins, we used advanced tech to determine whether users had played with multiple email addresses (but, of course, we’d never reveal that to a user on the front-end).
Simplified, client view userflow.
Process work and evolution (lo-fi wireframes through hi-fi production design):
A cool behind-the-scenes grab of the scenario mapping form we use to replicate and smoke-test each scenario that existed within the experience, many of which were dictated by a custom API built with our promotion vendor and developer.
Users were encouraged to come back daily to win different colored Gecko Funko Pops, like green.
Overnight, Gecko Funkos became a very hot collector item on Ebay, some selling for up to $100 each.
Skip to :40 - this fandom was so wild, that within 4 minutes of the site launching, our promotion vendor was reporting well over 10,000 server hits/second. That number then jumped to over 100,000/second after 10 minutes. That type of traffic, uninhibited, clogged promotions servers creating errors for about 24 hours — which of course made the campaign go even more viral.
Check out Twitter’s buzz on it here.
We hurried to fix it. ;)
And as to the above broadcast spot… I helped add these little custom trackable “easter egg” QR codes within the scenes that routed users directly to our site.
Pinch me. Please. Am I dreaming?
The creative team even decided to show the mobile screen design I produced in the commercial!
*faints*
As an added bonus, I proposed some in-app cross-promotional screens to get GEICO customers to interact with the campaign in addition to general audiences.
I’m also a GEICO Customer, so I literally used my app as a base for how our messaging would appear in their brand’s iOS app design as an ultra low-lift opportunity with no additional coding required, simply replacing text and images within the app’s existing design architecture.
The screens were proposed to run from Sept 1 - Oct 31 within the app.
Results:
Boiled down results that my analytics team will get mad at me for oversimplifying:
5,843,451 unique visitors over October and November.
5,787,854 unique visitors in October alone.
17,144,623 page views in October alone.
For perspective, 5,787,854 is nearly 2% of the population of the entire United States!
Theoretically if Ipsos or Gallop did a large enough survey, we could expect to hear that 1/50 people queried would have visited the site and likely more than that would have heard of it.
The campaign, although not inexpensive, was still extraordinarily cost effective, and one of GEICO’s highest ROI campaigns produced to date — showing the power of a well-executed digital activation.
Not to mention, one of my projects was featured in a GEICO commercial, so now I can die.
Role: lead digital producer