By Kevin Whitlock
Last year one of our clients, environmental awareness and education charity Adventure Ecology (www.adventureecology.com), tasked us with raising awareness of the real-life impact of climate change among a young and tech-savvy audience.
The Ogilvy Advertising team decided to target Second Life, the popular internet-based virtual world created by Linden Labs (www.secondlife.com). After gaining permission to flood large areas of this virtual world, we seeded a story to Second Life contacts the night before the virtual deluge, posting locations and flood times. We then posted a clip of the flood on YouTube and sent it out to Second Lifers who’d witnessed the event.
We also worked with Technorati and BogPulse to track the blogosphere’s response. Although only a comparatively small number (about 75) of Second Lifers witnessed the flood first hand, virtually all of them are connected with hundreds of others, and word spread like wildfire - and not just in the marketing community: we got some big hits on environmental blogs too.
From a single notice posted on a blog (plus a bit of good old fashioned PR) our virtual flood garnered a huge amount of coverage - in mainstream press such as The Independent, as well as trade titles sch as Contagious, Campaign and Shots. Our campaign was also picked up by the online versions of such prestigious publications as The Guardian and National Geographic and caught the imagination of bloggers worldwide.
The reasult was that for a comparatively small outlay, we got our client around £350,000 worth of editorial coverage, resulting in a 54% increase in web traffic and a tenfold increase in blog mentions.
This innovative campaign has already won its fair share of plaudits and we’ve just heard about the latest - it’s made it into the Creative Review magazine’s Annual, a prestigious publication which recognises the best creative endeavour (in all fields) from the past year.
Find out more at www.creativereview.co.uk
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