Interactive campaigns

As a sponsor of the 2019 UEFA Champions League, Heineken’s message to football fans was simple: don’t even blink. The matches can be so dynamic that even a small distraction could make you miss a game changer.

We created The Focus: an interactive experience, in which Heineken challenged football fans to stare down Andrea Pirlo, a player known for his concentration on the field. Blink or look away and it’s over. Face tracking through your device’s camera did the judging.

The safe build at the time was a native mobile app, or a desktop-only site where the webcam behaved predictably. We decided to take up the technical challenge instead. Running the face tracking in a browser, on a phone, was the harder build — but it meant no install, no store listing, and a campaign you could reach from a link. That’s what turned a technically interesting idea into something a hundred thousand people could try in seconds.

In 2017 Visa started an initiative to close the gap between teenagers’ interest in their own pocket money and their disinterest in finance. Its goal was to get the subject into Bulgarian secondary schools and improve students’ financial literacy.

Teenagers can’t earn money but want to have nice things. So we created Pocket Science, a fashion brand you bought with knowledge: a collection of oversized sweatshirts, tees, caps and patches. The prints were where we made the subject fun, with finance puns like Deposit Queen and Debit Cardio.

The entry point was an online shop like any other, but with prices listed in points. Behind it was the test portal, showing through as the gradient frame around every page. It was always open, whether you were short of points or just curious.

Most campaigns like this hand out badges, streaks and leaderboards — points that buy more points. Here the points were the currency that bought a sweatshirt a fifteen-year-old actually wanted.

For Safer Internet Day 2017, Telenor and the Centre for Safe Internet wanted teenagers to think before posting. The numbers were hard to argue with: over six years the average age of a Bulgarian child’s first time online had dropped from 10 to 7, a third of children had talked to a stranger online, and about a fifth of those had gone on to meet them.

Nobody changes their behaviour because they were told to, especially kids. We had to find a different way to make them think.

First, we invented a fake teenager. Emil Dobromirov, or Emo, had a Facebook, an Instagram and a Snapchat, all filled with ordinary posts. Hidden inside them was everything you’d need to find him: from his school and his home address, all the way to his current location. The posts came out of our team’s personal archives, and in the pre-AI era his face had to be professionally retouched into someone who didn’t exist, so no real child was exposed.

We then invited teenagers to a ten-question quiz about him. But the answers weren’t hidden in screenshots on the campaign’s microsite. To learn where his summer house was, they went to his actual Instagram and found the location tagged on a post. Keeping it all on the microsite would have been an easier campaign to run, but it would also have made the whole thing a simulation of stalking rather than the real thing. Doing it properly is what let the message on the last screen work: “You found him — now, shall we find you?”

That discomfort was the point; without it, nobody would have looked at what they share the same way.