Primarily aimed at Telecom Mobile 027 customers, Push The Button was a continuation of an ongoing strategy to make them feel vindicated for being with Telecom Mobile by providing fun activities where cool prizes could be won, but most importantly to make Vodafone users feel excluded.

The TOUCH/CAST team originally conceived Push The Button over a lazy Christmas Day Bar-B-Q at one of their homes. It was an audacious idea and hugely ambitious. We were aware that a Trust had been formed to take possession of a decommissioned Leander class ex-Naval frigate, the former HMNZS Wellington (F69). Their reason for being was to sink it off the coast of Wellington, New Zealand to provide a unique recreational dive wreck and home to coastal marine life.

The Sink F69 Trust had been working on this project for a number of years and had successfully obtained the consents needed to move ahead with the project – obviously this included the need to strip and clean the ship to meet some incredibly stringent environmental and Health & Safety requirements.

The Idea:

We wanted to follow up the success of RPS027 and so realised that the sinking of the F69 could present a huge opportunity to leverage an upcoming event that was likely to create a lot of it’s own publicity. Our concept was actually very simple. Inspired by the classic game of Battleships, we conceived the idea of an SMS version of this well known game, with the objective being to locate the ‘virtual’ former HMNZS Wellington (F69).

However, this was to be an SMS tournament like no other because the overall winner, (the last person left in the KO tournament) would win a ‘once in a lifetime’ prize. He or she would single-handedly push the button to trigger explosions that sink the real F69 – in front of what we hoped would be thousands of people.






The solution:

With an idea this ‘crazy’, we decided to approach the Sink F69 Trust first to see if we could get the rights for Telecom Mobile to select the ‘button pusher’ – the Trust folk loved the idea, and so with a tiny amount of trepidation, in March 2005 we presented our concept to Telecom Mobile.

Our client demonstrated once again their passion and bravery, by giving us the green light to start work on the project. Secrecy was absolutely paramount, particularly as the sinking event was not going to take place until November 2005.

Results

The overall winner was a 22-year-old female student, Jo Smith and she pushed the button that sank the F69 on November 13th 2005 in front of an estimated spectator audience of over 100,00 on land, and over 220 vessels on the water.

Push The Button was a fully integrated campaign / game that broke the mould in terms of applying maximum leverage to the sponsorship of the actual event. (click to see the sinking: PC 2mb or MAC 3mb)

This campaign also went on to become the biggest TXT game event in NZ’s history beating the previous record holder, Rock Paper Scissors – another campaign we’d developed earlier this year.

The sign-up period was only 8 days long. (click here to
view TVC)

People who engaged with the promo - over 115,000

Registered players - over 90,000 - in an 8 day sign-up period

Mobile originated text messages from players for the game - 2.5 million

Media- General News

Media attention in this campaign has been enormous with the winner of the Telecom Mobile competition getting extensive news coverage on TV, radio and in newspapers within NZ across all networks, stations and major newspapers. The international media including CNN also covered the event.

Media- Industry News

www.adrants.com, a well known international, web-based industry newsletter carried two stories on the campaign.

The UK based, global quarterly publication, Cream (celebrating media innovation and creativity) approached us for more information and then awarded us with an entry in their Winter 2005 edition. Cream was established by Charlie Crowe who had previously worked at Emap where he was the Editor-in-Chief of Media & Marketing Europe magazine.

Contagious also awarded the campaign an entry into the next issue of their quarterly journal (due out in December 2005. Contagious also goes out with a DVD and so our campaign, including footage of the sinking will feature within the DVD as well. ‘Established by the people behind Shots, Contagious is a quarterly intelligence briefing in magazine, DVD and online format. It identifies the ideas, trends and innovations behind the world’s most revolutionary marketing strategies’.

Interestingly, the campaign was also reported in the Marketing & Media section of De Telegraaf Sunday’s edition, 20th November 2005 – on page 2!

Another example of how moving from the traditional advertising model of marketing interruption, to one of market experience and engagement can pay big dividends!