The campaign integrates loads of interactive and experiential elements, including a rich digital hub for all that’s hip and happening in the city, a delightfully intriguing iPhone app, and a chance each week for an entire year to Play Melbourne and win a spontaneous visit.

The campaign is self-supporting through Social, but we had to light the fuse somewhere – and light it we did, with a set of web ads springing from the Play Melbourne story. They’re an intriguing, interactive, upmarket and enticing bunch of rich and standard banners that drive tens of thousands of visitors to the site each time they run.

It was a pleasure and a real workout to be Digital CD on this job, and big thanks to everybody in the world who was involved in making this work: the inimitable JC and the indefatigable RI; Pete Bakacs for piccies; Brendan McMahon for engineering; Matt Houltham for early wrangling; Fracture for gorgeous Flash… oh, look, just… thanks, EVERYBODY.

Taking the iconic-in-New-Zealand but globally tiny Steinlager Pure brand to the world was not going to be easy — especially with a budget that would barely get us one month on a Times Square billboard. We went back to the product truth and came up with a plan that would resonate with urban dwellers the world over.

That plan: When you buy a Steinlager Pure, you get a piece of pure New Zealand. There’s a great video of the result, here.

It took a while, but we worked with our client (the wonderful Ben Wheeler) to reserve 120 hectares of native New Zealand forest and wetland, in the name of Steinlager Pure drinkers in our launch markets. The deal: Buy one Steinlager Pure, enter your code, and you get a unique piece of this iconic part of New Zealand reserved in your name. Buy another, and you add a chance to visit your piece of land for real – courtesy of Steinlager.

Steinlager Pure was a niche brand launching into behemoth beer markets like the US, Canada and the UK, so we had to make sure the idea would cut through. Posters showed actual shots of the land, divided into unique portions. Coasters were cut from those poster images, each containing an innovative snap-to-open code. Buy the beer, get the coaster (already a unique piece), then enter your code via SMS, mobile site or on the App to get an instant reward right at the point of purchase.

Imagine a piece of the purest land in the world secured in your name – and the chance to see it for real.

Of course we added easy ways to spread the word through social networks, and ultimately we’re starting to build a database in each market for regular dialogue. But making the exchange feel very real for participants was key, and a standout element is the iPhone App with its goosebump-inducing motion-controlled panoramas – along with an Augmented Reality compass-based Pure finder that even shows you where and how far away your piece of purity is.

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As the iconic underdog battler brand on the Australian mobile scene, Virgin Mobile had all the right in the world to leap into social marketing boots and all. Our team at Publicis Digital in Auckland – Andre, me, Jeremy and Rochelle – conceptualised and designed an approach designed to break through the corporate culture and treat Virgin Mobile “members” like, well, rock stars.

Based in a slick, ultra-fluid site built by our team in Australia, and driven via a Twitter feed packed with surprise gigs, topups, freebies, shoutouts and more, the Members’ Lounge leverages Virgin’s unique personality and familiar rock star personality to create what was at the time a completely new style of customer retention community, pushing highly customised content and offers to Virgin Mobile customers – or should we say, members. One of those wonderful projects when strategy, ideation, design, development, the web tools to make it happen and a fully engaged client results in something really cool. Me likey.

A quick-step journey through sites best suited to a life lived to the full

Not your ordinary website for not your ordinary beer: when Steinlager Edge debuted as the mid-strength beer for those living life to the full, we knew we had to pull something out of the bag to not only help explain the product benefit, but to cut through — with an idea that actually added value to the web experience, rather than interrupting it.

Visit the site

The result: a seamless, swift, iFrame-based choose-your-own-adventure journey through some of the best local content – selected purely for those to whom living a full life is not about doing less, but about doing it all.

Your journey begins at one of many clear-cut web ads (with up to three times average click-through) inviting you to decide what’s next. We set up multiple journeys based on themes like Work vs Play, and Home vs Away, and lead you through sites that prove the web is not just for email and news, but inspiration and opportunity. Each site was carefully selected to help provide ideas for getting ahead, getting away, or getting inspired — and each step was also closely tied with an occasion to drink.

Every page featured an iFrame journey selector, acting as a stepping-stone to the next

Using iFrames allowed us to control the journey, while providing full, uninterrupted access to the entire content of each site that agreed to join us in promoting Steinlager Edge – right down to ensuring Flash movies would still run under our overlay (thanks CactusLab!)

In a world dominated by perceptions of carbonated beverages being “fizzy pop for kids”, Schweppes was not being consumed at adult occasions. Something resonant needed to happen to remind the audience of the timeless, adult sophistication of Schweppes. The web was the perfect medium to deliver content unashamedly targeted at adults. The team at Mojo created an online-only Short Film Festival, featuring filmic stories that reflect adult experiences and aspirations, leaving the audience intrigued, invigorated and wanting to know more.

Our team was asked to “invigorate” the relatively static site. Amongst a slew of enhancements, we added an intriguing, sophisticated and entertaining Bar experience… with more than one twist. Visit the site to see what I mean.

With over 1.4 million unique visitors to date, at an average of 7.6 minutes on site, that’s 10 million minutes of brand engagement.

Better web design delivers absolute clarity

While a set of truly excellent TV commercials did the impossible job of making Panasonic’s great TVs look amazing on other people’s rubbish TVs, we worked in the background to ensure Viera’s entire web presence – search and website – reflected the “Absolute Clarity” message. That meant reviewing everything: from a redesign to reflect the glossy, high-end feel of the TVs themselves, right through to staging the copy in deeper and deeper layers so the average visitor wasn’t scared away by jargon from the start. And the site’s structure and all that copy was designed in concert with the Search team to lure visitors in and drop them on the right page, depending on their search term, which depends on their stage in the buying process.

Result? From number three to number one in flatscreen TVs in six months, while a competitor even gave up and exited the market. That’s a pretty clear indication of success.

Our man will sort out your shambles of a mate...

Everyone has a mate who is a bit of a shambles in the morning.

We helped give them a bit of a wake up call – in the form of a personalised video from a no-nonsense character, who knows their name, mocks their morning mocha, and gives them a simple solution: wake up and drink Tararua Real Iced Coffee.

Every video was unique – triggered by an email, and seamlessly stitched together on the fly from more than 115 individual clips. During the 33,000 minutes of brand engagement we generated, over 50% of videos previewed were sent to a friend – and nine out of ten of those friends clicked through to be given a wake-up call they won’t forget.

A further innovation came as we looked to convert interest to trial. We made sure each shambles of a mate could book a perfectly timed, pre-personalised wake-up call to their mobile in the morning – complete with a txt coupon for the all new no-nonsense Tararua Real Iced Coffee at the nearest gas station.

The campaign not only gave thousands of kiwi blokes a bit of a wake up call; we proved that people engage with FMCG brands in the digital space – and we helped the product sell well over target: in the first eight weeks it sold twice what the benchmark product sells… in an entire year. And that’s a bit of a wake up call for the entire category.

Face to face with the Australian Cricket Team

We adapted the ground-breaking 2007 Weet-Bix All Blacks Face2Face campaign to create a site that let Australians face up to their cricket heroes via the web or mobile, to see which one they most resemble.

Highlights:
• Learning the background and hearing from the team about how exciting it was developing the All Blacks version of this with the irrepressible Daniel Lee reminded me of the reasons I chose to join Ogilvy in the first place.
• However. A relaxed bout of to-ing and fro-ing in the selling-in stages left us with the most insanely compressed timeline I have ever, ever seen (and I’ve seen a few)…
• …made worse by the Christmas break — and a freelancer who did “nothing” over a ten-day period. And by “nothing”, I mean “not a thing”.
• Without the incredible willpower, outright skill and incomprehensibly good humour of the lead team (Super Rupert, Farah the Invincible and freelance developer Oscar the Invisible), there is no way the agency would have survived this process.
• And many, many thanks to the rest of the team who kept their own balls in the air, while this project – supporting one of Australasia’s greatest brands and one of Australia’s greatest sports teams – was successfully managed to completion. You know who you are.

Two doors: one leads to excitement, the other to enchantment

A sideline to the then-newly revamped Millennium Copthorne corporate site, this blog-based travel journal is packed with local ideas, supplied by hotel staff and delivered from two points of view: do you want to play, or pause?

What it does: A great job of adding personality to Millennium & Copthorne hotels by allowing staff to share their knowledge and ideas, for guests to enjoy from an invigorating or relaxing perspective. Endlessly updatable, and the more content the better.

Who built it: The idea was sold in by Daryl Arnold. Joel, Farah and myself knocked it into shape, while Jon and May kicked off the design for May and Andy to polish. Back end by Kash Neo and Friends; initial content from me, writer / editor Vanessa Wood, and very receptive and helpful clients Jinou Park and Darren Ng and Friends.

What we learned: When your idea is sold in properly, the rest will follow. Play / Pause is a good example of a project that came together just right: a great idea, creatively presented through moodboards, concept sketches and client involvement, all leading to collective agreement. That agreement was taken up by a motivated creative team producing first-class design, built upon a modular backend written by professional developers, populated with professional writing, and all managed by a project manager… we even had a scope document, a timeline and a contract. Joy!