June 19, 2008
Background
Cálico Electronico (www.calicoelectronico.com) is a webtoon by Nikodemo Animation with 50 million followers since October 2004. All the animation is made in Flash format, a previously unknwon tool in animation. They have demystified the limited use of the flash tool, opening new horizons away from the Internet and arriving to forms of communication proving that medium is not an issue.
FuturLink and Nikodemo have developed a mobile marketing campaign to promote the one-off screening of Cálico Electrónico in cinemas on the 8th of May.
Objectives
The objectives of the mobile marketing campaign were inviting the public from Madrid and Barcelona to go to the cines on May 8th, 2008 and interact with them to know their feedback about the session. It was the first time that Calico Electronico interacts with their public away from their traditional channel, Internet.
Solution
Futurlink created the caimpaing in two steps.
The first step was inviting the public to go to the cines watch Calico Electronico. In order to get this aim, the communications channels used to communicate with nearby users were telephone boxes located in a circuit of the most central streets of Barcelona and Madrid. Fifteen boxes scattered around the centre of each city centre invited passers-by to download the Cálico Electrónico trailer to their mobile phone via Bluetooth.
The proximity mobile marketing campaign spread over 15 days before the movie session, located within the main Spanish cities: Madrid and Barcelona.
The mobile marketing campaign was consisting in one Calico electronico trailler and a message inviting then to go to the Cine on May 8th.
The second step and a really important one was create a user generated content action spread during the lauching day of Calico Electronico in the cines. On the day of the one-off screenings of the Cálico ‘movie’ on Thursday the 8th of May, in cinemas in Madrid (Tresaguas) and Barcelona (Icaria), the general public also played an acting role in the event. In the cinema halls, after watching the film, members of the audience recorded their opinions on video using their mobile phones and interacted with the Bluetooth access point to upload and store them. These videos were later uploaded to the Cálico Electrónico website.
FuturLink platform, which uses wireless technologies such as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, allowed a bidirectional interaction channels between Cálico and the fans. It was the first “co-creation” activity carried out using FuturLink’s Bluetooth devices and the video cameras of users’ mobile phones.
Results
The campaign has proved to be a success. Just one week after the campaign launch, 800 tickets were sold and more cinemas screens had to be made available to ensure that nobody was left without a ticket. The results were very encouraging - on the first day of the campaign, over 24 hours, 1,300 people downloaded the trailer to their mobile. In just a week, 19,000 people had downloaded the content in this campaign which works away from the Internet, the series’ usual distribution medium.
The user generated content campaign completed the campaign sucess; the public outweigh the expectations confirming the success of interactive activities with “user-generated content” and of the convergence of media such as mobiles and the Internet. In just few minutes more then 2 videos per minute were being generated by the users after the movie session.
