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Digital agency Profero’s award-winning MINI World Record Attempt campaign took digital innovation out into the real world. CEO Dale Gall talks to Figaro about ideas, technology and the role of innovation itself
It’s 53 years since the first Mini rolled off the BMC production line at Longbridge. Since then the little car that could has survived 10 prime ministers, several recessions, starred in two versions of The Italian Job and been voted second most influential car of the twentieth century. Though produced by BMW since 2000, the marque remains an icon of British design.
The new MINI Countryman, launched in 2010, is the first four-door version and Profero worked collaboratively with MINI and Hyperspace (the innovation arm of outdoor specialist Posterscope) to develop an award-winning campaign which helped ensure the first consignment sold out before the official launch. The project married digital technology with real life experience, projecting video of users into a specially built model of the car displayed at shopping centres around the UK. Over 10,000 people saw themselves crammed inside, significantly exceeding the real-life record of 28. So what was MINI’s brief to Profero, how did the agencies approach it, and what was its value to the client?
Auto-expansion
“This is the first four-door MINI,” says Dale Gall, CEO at Profero. “So we asked ourselves, how do we get across all this extra space in a way that still conveys ‘Mini-ness’? That in itself was quite a challenging brief and further complicated by the fact that this was pre-launch
activity, so no actual cars existed. But MINI had already created a series of exact fibreglass replicas and Ysabel Vazquez, the lead client, gave us a very clear brief – find ways to use them to create a deep level of engagement and generate leads. And most great ideas start with a clear brief.
“Elspeth Lynn, our ECD, then insists we always start with strategy and insight,” says Gall. “An understanding of the brand. So first we asked, what’s true to the car? There’s its adventurous spirit, its quirkiness. But we also needed to say something about space. And we came up with the idea, how many people can you fit in a MINI? It’s the age old joke, but we asked, how do we enable that digitally?”
The answer came when Profero and their partners developed a suite of algorithms and data transfer routines utilising existing graphical standards like Microsoft DirectX. This meant the large amounts of data necessary for HD video could be captured, processed and projected into the fiberglass model within about 15 seconds. “It’s a phenomenal piece of tech,” says Gall. Elspeth Lynn immediately saw the potential. “Then it became a case of: it’s a great idea; we see the technology that can do it. How do we make it real?”
Profero presented the idea to MINI who, Gall acknowledges, took a bold move in commissioning it. The Profero and Hyperspace teams worked together to fit out the fiberglass replica cars with projectors and servers and, in conjunction with Hyperspace, worked out how to install the model in shopping centres across eight British cities. So with the idea, the tech and the car itself in place, what was the experience for shoppers?
Data squeeze
“To take part, users had to enter a video capture booth and press their faces up against a plate of glass which recorded five or 10 seconds of video which was then looped,” says Gall. “You had to enter some very basic social media details, and that was it. By the time you left the booth, you were already being projected into the MINI, which was positioned directly outside on a plinth.”
Crucial here was the harvesting of user data. “What do we get from that?” says Gall. “Prospects that could be added to MINI’s prospect database and included into the CRM programme with a view to encouraging test drives. The activity generated over 5,000 leads for the Countryman while creating a brand experience that was fresh and innovative and said a lot about the MINI brand,” he says. “There’s no econometric modeling that can isolate what we did versus other media channels, PR and the work the dealers were doing, but the fact is it worked. It’s a value exchange. To quote The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the way you fly is you miss the ground. And the way you get data is you make it feel as if people aren’t giving you their data. Instead they think, ‘I want to do that.’ That’s the price of entry.”
By the time the campaign was complete, 10,450 people had seen themselves squashed into the MINI and posted their involvement to their Facebook walls. Hyperspace, who researched and booked the locations, also calculated the average footfall in each shopping centre. But, says Gall, “We all took a conservative view and halved that. We said, of the 3 million people that were in those locations over that period, 1.5 million saw it and 10,450 people actually interacted with the activity. The average interaction time was seven minutes. That, again, is probably a pessimistic view, but it’s a big number.”
The phygital future
What made this such an eye-catching campaign was that merging of physical and digital technology – an approach some are calling ‘phygital’. Undeniably innovative though this is, for Gall the campaign succeeded because it understood the brand and represented a specific solution to a specific brief.
“So much of our work,” he says, “is about trying to generate great results for our clients and that can often mean very quotidian responses that just make sense. It can be as simple as improving SEO or making our creative work with really good media technologies so that we get the data. They’re not necessarily innovative, and nor should they be. You don’t want to innovate everyday. It’s unnecessary. So much of it is about helping your client extract value, build their brand, improve their sales and be a good partner. Bad partners offer crazy ideas every day! That’s not the business we’re in. We’re in the business of creating belonging for our clients. That’s about really good experiences. Not about disruptive, ridiculously innovative experiences. Though sometimes it is. You should always be excited about solving the problem that the client gives you rather than just using the latest technology. If you’re about using the latest technology, your business will fail and you won’t serve your clients well. And ultimately it’s a service.”
The MINI campaign bagged the Creativity Premium Award at the 2011 BIMAs, won in four other categories and Profero were also named Agency of the Year. Given that success, where does Gall think marketers need to be focusing their attention over the next year?
“Digital is just a technology,” he says. “What we live in is the age of access. People have phenomenal access to each other and to experiences, and it’s really a question of what type of experiences can you enable for people, and of using technology to enable better interaction, better delivery of the brand promise and the proposition. It’s never about screens to me. That’s not really interesting. When the client has an issue, a problem or an ambition, it’s about how we use our understanding of consumers and technology to solve that problem.”
Also significant, he says, is the seamless experience. “Increasingly consumers don’t really care about the platform, they just care about the experience. And the more serendipitous it feels across platforms, the better.” Experience itself, he says, “is about how you use insight. Innovation is about speed and experience rather than just technology and I think that’s where great leaps can be made by brands. To be really insightful about the experiences you can create that are true to the brand, and how fast you can bring them to market.”
Central to Profero’s overarching strategy, says Gall, is the notion of belonging, and a sense that brands need to be built over time. “We try to create brands that people belong to,” he says. “There are three key metrics to belonging. Anyone can measure them, and any brand that gets those metrics to go up will be successful. If I belong, I’ll spend more time with you. I’ll spend more of my social currency with you. And I’ll spend more of my money with you. Time, social currency and money. That’s key for any business to succeed. Belonging engenders that, and that’s why were hung up on it.”
Article by Jon Fortgang
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