The one where we won the internet.
With this project, we weren't trying to, like, "do telepresence" so much as we just wanted to find a way to let people affect the actual Sun Valley landscape. Instead of using the (small) summer marketing budget on banners and Facebook ads, we proposed an earned media project. Specifically, a robot that would let people skip stones on a lake in Sun Valley from their computers, in real time, and watch the whole thing live.
The thing about selling-in the idea of a stone skipping robot…is then you have to go build a stone skipping robot. So we did.
Part of our pitch to our clients was that this would put the “earned” in earned media. There was no way we wouldn’t get some choice coverage for creating an experience like this, and those high-profile articles would lead to a certain number of impressions and clickthroughs, and the awareness and continued amplification that comes with press buzz and aggregation. So we secured a launch day exclusive in Mashable, which led to immediate coverage in nice internet real estate like Fast Company and MSNBC’s Future of Tech, among others.
Then “Skippy” made the front page of Reddit and things went a bit bananas. Extra server space was purchased post-haste. Extra satellite internet was pumped in. The queues to use our beloved robot were filling up first thing in the morning.
In a shocking twist, the hive mind of Twitter had overwhelmingly positive things to say about it. Plus it ended up getting discussed on gossipy tv shows, and took on a life of its own for awhile. All this eventually led to recognition at the Webbys, and was a considerable overdelivery in the realm of an earned media project.
And all that attention, and all the tweeting, was cool for Skippy, but the best part was people spending something like 5 minutes on average staring at live video feed of a lake and some mountains in Sun Valley. And getting a good idea what it's like to be there. And picturing themselves there in the summertime. Which was, after all, the whole point.
