134 The Best Digital Marketing Campaigns in the World
Target audience
Art and culture lovers, residents of and visitors to the city Frankfurt am Main.Action
To help promote the street art exhibition online, and to encourage people to
actually engage and participate in real-world activities on the streets of Frank-
furt, the ‘Playing the City’ campaign used an innovative flash-based website
based around the concept of an online interactive board game. Users were
able to navigate the site by clicking on sections of a virtual 3D game board
depicting locations around Frankfurt, or by clicking on a quirky ‘virtual human
die’ in the bottom left hand corner. Rolling the die caused real people on the
page to move around, arranging themselves into patterns representing the
number rolled on the die. The user would then be presented with a piece of
content representing a section of the virtual game board and a real exhibit on
the streets of Frankfurt, thus ‘playing’ the city. An online calendar allowed
people to see all of the events/exhibits at a glance.Blurring the lines and establishing a tangible connection between the virtual
world of the ‘Playing the City’ website and the real streets of Frankfurt was a
fundamental strategy of the campaign. To get the ball rolling, raise public
awareness and generate online and offline buzz, the team started the cam-
paign by randomly attaching ‘Team-Mates’ tags to members of the public at
traffic lights around Frankfurt. On discovering the tags later, they were encour-
aged to go to the ‘Playing the City’ site and enter a unique code from their
particular tag. They were presented with an online video, showing them
getting tagged earlier in the day, and inviting them to visit the main exhibition
website and to share their experience with their online friends.As well as the site itself the campaign harnessed a variety of social media
tools and online communication media to engage with its audience, generate
buzz and promote online conversation around the exhibit. These included an
e-mail newsletter, an integrated blog, a YouTube channel, a Twitter account
and a Facebook page all spreading the word about ‘Playing the City’.