McCann | SunMatrix Ramble

Sunday Grannies

Romania has a large population of elderly people from which 40% are living alone. Using this insight, Vodafone and McCann Erickson Bucharest decided to spin a marketing campaign around two Romanian widows who were still in a habit of cooking enough food for a full family dinner.

Using social media, the campaign invited students desperate for a home-cooked meals, to join the ‘Sunday Grannies’ for food. As a result, the grannies’ Facebook page got nearly half-a-million likes, they were covered on the evening news, they got a TV show, were visited by Romanian celebrities, and they started a new trend. Vodafone who used their product to address such a problematic social issue, saw a 78% increase in 4G smart phone sales.

Pay Per Laugh

In mid-2013, the art industry in Spain suffered a big blow. The government decided to raise tax for theatrical shows from 8% to 21%, resulting in a great loss of audience. So independent comedy theatre company Teatreneu decided to launch a comedy show that you paid for only when you laughed.

Entrace to the show was totally free. But for every laugh during the show the spectator had to pay 30 euro cents, with the maximum amount being 24 Euros for 80 laughs. This unique way of charging for the show was made possible by fitting each theatre seat with a facial recognition system that detected the smile of the spectators.

As a result, the average price of the ticket increased by 6 Euros. The technology used was the talk of the town and it increased the show viewership by 35%.

The evolution of iBeacons

iBeacons are the future of retail. However last week I spotted two unique examples of how the technology could be used beyond retail…

SnackBall Machine

GranataPet is a pet food company from the Bavarian Alps. In their latest campaign, they decided to port the fitness hype from the human world to the dog world.

With the help of their ad agency MRM / McCann Germany, they developed a SnackBall Machine that automatically launched a tennis ball (embedded with an iBeacon) in the park when the dog owner checked-in with #snackball on Twitter. The dog that quickly returned with the ball was then rewarded with a healthy GranataPet Snack, that was activated by the proximity of the ball to the machine.

Since its launch across various large German cities, GranataPet has seen a 27% lift in sales at various local pet food shops.

Tzukuri iBeacon Glasses

Australian company Tzukuri (phonetic spelling of “to make” in Japanese) has successfully combined a tiny iBeacon chip with regular sunglasses, that automatically and permanently connect with the users iPhone. So when the user leaves the sunglasses somewhere he is automatically alerted via a custom iPhone app.

More infos on the glasses are available at: www.tzukuri.com

Coca-Cola Peace Machines

Over the years Coca-Cola has experimented with their vending machines and tried to make them much more than just the average soda-spitter-outer.

Last year they placed two vending machines, one in India and the other in Pakistan and turned them into a communication portal. These “Small World Machines” allowed citizens from both countries to interact with each other and even complete shared tasks for which the machines rewarded them with a Coke.

The success of that has inspired Coca-Cola to once again bring fighting parties together. Now instead of bringing together nations at odds, it has tapped into the rivalry between Italian soccer teams Inter and Milan.

To ease the aggression between the fans, Coca-Cola installed their “Fair Play Machines” on opposite sides of Milan’s San Siro stadium as the teams faced off. Pressing the button of one machine dropped a Coke can down the chute of that on the side of the rival team. So this way rivals could only receive Cokes from each other. The results…

Dumb Ways to Die

Accident rates on the Melbourne Metro were rising due to an increase in risky behavior around trains. Since a rail safety message was the last thing people wanted to hear, and traditional public safety messages just did not work any more. McCann Melbourne decided to turn the message people needed to hear, into a message that people wanted to hear by embedding the messaging into a song and accompanying music video: Dumb Ways to Die…

By using entertainment, not shock tactics, the message transcended advertising to become social currency. Dumb Ways to Die became the most shared public service campaign in history, with over 1.7 million social media shares in the first month alone. Here is the case video…