Case Studies

• Base One's viral campaign for Rackspace
• Concep's microsite for Cushman & Wakefield
• Gyro International's lead generation website for McAfee
• Fleishman Hillard's e-newsletter for Motorola
• Concep's email platform for Cadwalader
• Reeves' email campaign for ScienceDirect College Edition

Base One's viral campaign for Rackspace

Rackspace provides managed hosting and managed email solutions. Its services include web hosting, data warehousing, hosting online applications and managed email hosting. The company has built its reputation around a commitment to customer support, which it calls ‘Fanatical support'. The firm assigns substantial resources to creating and maintaining awareness of what amounts to a key differentiator over its competitors.

Gets better with age

The message was simple: once a Rackspace customer, defection is unlikely as ‘Fanatical support' goes on forever. Humour and involvement bring messages alive so Rackspace felt that an interactive viral campaign involving humour would reach the widest audience possible and to direct people to the Rackspace website. It would be entertaining, memorable and would encourage the users to involve friends and business associates.

The concept created was the 'Old timer's machine' viral, an online interactive programme which showed people what they would look like in 20 years time when they were still Rackspace customers of course. Users simply uploaded an image of themselves, a colleague, or searched Google for a famous or infamous stand in. Once the image had uploaded the user, as makeover artist, can manipulate it using a series of simple tools to add grey hair, baldness, wrinkles and various outrageous accessories to mimic the effect of age.

Ridiculous and amusing images need an audience so the results were shared by users by numerous means including social community websites such as MySpace and Facebook as well as by forwarding the link by email.

Spreading the news

Users of top-level hosting services such as mission-critical websites and internet applications enjoy daftness as much as anyone. A budget of £20,000 was allocated to cover the creation of a viral and email fulfilment, and 2000 Rackspace customers from across Europe, the Middle East and Africa were selected to receive a link to the Old timer's machine by email. They were the seeds from which the campaign would spread to a much broader target audience. People told people, who then told others, many of whom were unfamiliar with the Rackspace brand, but whose future influence and word-of-mouth potential were significant.

Results

Within six months 25,000 people across the world had generated 162,866 page views, creating and sharing images of themselves with colleagues, friends and associates. The number swelled as a result of personal referrals, links from referral sites such as stumbleupon.com (12,766 visits), coolsiteoftheday.com (1730 visits) and social networking sites. The machine was also located 964 times via Google. And people are still visiting,

Globally the concept has crossed cultural and linguistic borders. The viral has been enjoyed by users in 112 countries including the United States, United Kingdom, Brazil, Canada, Sweden, Portugal, Australia, Ireland, Romania and Germany, giving a response rate of 1250 per cent.

Even though this was not a business generation exercise, Rackspace received the added bonus of an estimated 48,000 of new business attributable to clients accessing the Rackspace website from the viral. Over ten years such new business would generate 361,000 of net present value cash flow equating to an ROI of 1700 per cent.

Fabio Torlini, marketing director at Rackspace says, "The Old timer's machine fitted in with our ethos and certainly made the point about us being Fanatical Forever. To spread a brand message this quickly and effectively shows the power of viral marketing when it's done properly."