McDonald’s Avatarize Yourself: 2010 IMA winner
CATEOGORY: Viral Promotion
SECOND-PLACE CAMPAIGN: McDonald’s Avatarize Yourself
AGENCY: The Marketing Store
CLIENT: McDonald’s Europe
It was the sheer scale and global reach of this viral promotion around the release of the epic science fiction film “Avatar” that attracted the attention of the judges.
McDonald’s, known for partnering with blockbuster films, launched “Avatarize Yourself” in Europe just prior to the film’s release last December. The online promotion allowed people to transform themselves into 3D, blue-skinned Avatars and then share them across the globe with friends and family.
Web sites were developed for 18 different markets in seven languages. The key to the success was creating the experience as a sharable widget that could be placed anywhere across the Internet.
“The widget really added to the viral aspect and the power of the connections,” Kurt Karlenzig, vice president of global digital for The Marketing Store, said. “When someone invents something in Facebook all their friends see it and if their friends create something then you really get that network effect. Rather than a broadcast method of communication it becomes friend to friend. And that’s really how it spread around the globe.”
The sites logged more than 3 million visits within two weeks of the launch and more than 6 million by the time it was over Jan. 31. An astounding 37% of the traffic generated by the application itself was generated within someone’s Web site who had posted their own a Avatar. In Finland, for example, where 5.3 million people live, about 60% of the 2.9 million visits to the Finland Web site came from China and 8% from the U.S.
“It was so easy to embed on their own and have it show up on their blog or Web page so we weren’t forcing them to go to the McDonald’s site to have the experience for the application to go viral,” Geoff Miller, vice president, digital strategy director for The Marketing Store, said.
An astonishing 3.2 million photos were uploaded and 2.2 million Avatars were created. Players spent an average 9:42 making their own Avatars.
It all began with the McDonald’s European marketing director Antoinette Benoit in France being convinced about the power of the promotional plan after development partner Oddcast created a demo of an Avatar of Benoit herself. (Oddcast developed the application.)
“McDonald’s partnered with “Avatar” because it was innovative. The kind of a landmark film and the kind of value relationship that McDonald’s wants to have,” Miller said.
The Web sites also let people know that McDonald’s had a lot of “Avatar”-themed activity going on in its restaurants with a goal of attracting the attention of young adults and families.
As some of the European sites were ending the promotion and shutting down the sites, visitors were redirected to a central hub http://www.avatarizeyourself.com that still receives about 20,000 visits per day.
“We’ve hit almost 10 million,” Miller said. “There’s still a lot of residual activity.” —Patricia Odell
