Case Studies and Agency-led Initiatives

MULTI-NATIONAL SOCIAL MEDIA LAUNCH OF SMART TECHNOLOGIES INTERACTIVE WHITE BOARDS

Situation:

SMART Technologies, a Canadian company, and the world’s largest manufacturer of Interactive White Boards (IWB) approached the agency to develop a multinational digital campaign. Up until this point, SMART Technologies only communicated to school administration, principals and I.T. staff. The task here was to create a campaign that would ignite a passion with parents to begin to ask for SMART Technology Interactive White Boards in their classrooms.

Solution:

Through a strategic planning process, led by Jeff Plowman, and which included key client and agency cross-functional team members, a powerful creative strategy was born.

The strategic impetus to the campaign was two-fold:

1. There is a unique magic to how a SMART Board IWB brings learning to life for a child and their classroom;

2. Inside the client’s DNA was a real sense of responsibility to improving education for all its stakeholders around the world.

The collision of these two insights led to a higher order benefit, and one befitting the category leader, that being: Celebrate the love of learning.

Creative:

The strategy manifested itself firstly into a dramatic, stop-motion two-minute visualization of the SMART Board interactive white board entitled the “Magical Classroom”. This execution utilized unique and proprietary lessons actually used on the SMART Board in classrooms today. The feel was magical, anthemic and, with the ending asking parents to tell us who their favourite teacher.

This drove parents to the Love of Learning microsite, where a number of community building tactics were utilized including a shorter higher-order benefit brand film of the Love of learning; offering parents a chance to win a SMART Board IWB for a school of their choosing; offering parents tips inside a toolkit to help secure an IWB for their school.

Media:

The campaign was seeded preliminarily with bloggers in the seven key international markets. Secondly, because education is a culture specific aspect of society, a strategy to unite parents in a social and digital space was identified. This led to a multinational Facebook buy and all the benefits resulting from consolidating funds with one supplier for added-value. Thirdly, A digital Content and Publishing strategy was implemented to ensure an ongoing dialogue with these new consumers. Weekly analytics reports were produced and reviewed with client to ensure early detection of opportunities.

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Results:

As of June 30th, 2010 the SMART Love of Learning campaign had delivered over 30,000,000 impressions in the U.S. and Canada and had driven over 10,000 people to the microsites. The English Canada Facebook page saw steady overall acquisition growth with the majority of fans being predominantly female around “parent” age. The U.S. page evidenced significant growth in terms of fan acquisition with the majority of fans being on target Parents were entering the contest, north and south of the border. And they were spending almost three minutes on the site, which is healthy given the topic area.

Twitter mentions quickly reached a total of 1,484,424 people in North America alone.