M&C Saatchi launches ‘Optus Elephant Air Race’ Facebook game to leverage Qantas alliance
M&C Saatchi has created a major social media play for Optus to leverage its exclusive alliance with Qantas.
Air Race’ is a Facebook-based game
that extends the eye-catching ATL campaign in market that features flying Optus animals to launch the Qantas partnership. The Facebook game involves users customising their own Elephant and racing it around the world via connecting Qantas routes.
The race travels one route a day for 10 days. Blackberry 9300 and Huawei X1 pre-paid handsets are up for grabs each day for the owners of the fastest elephants over that day’s route.
The elephant with the fastest cumulative time over the 10 daily races will win a $10,000 Qantas holiday voucher for its owner.
Race-goers’ greater engagement is rewarded with boosted air speed for their elephants via a variety of methods including votes from Facebook friends and code words released daily by Optus via Facebook, Twitter, Hot Hits and Nova Radio shows.
M&C Saatchi Executive Creative Director Ben Welsh said the game “is a fun and very sticky extension that keeps up the momentum of a well received campaign”.
Says Welsh: “It also demonstrates the multi-discipline capabilities we have in-house at M&C Saatchi. MAKE did a fantastic job racing to pull all this together in a tight time frame.”
The Race began at 12 noon today (Tuesday 4 October) and runs until 13 October, with the Elephants in-flight from 10am to 5pm (AEDST) each day.
Steve Farkas – Digital Group Head
Janet Stone – Copywriter
Trish Fabling – Senior Producer
Jenna Halliday – Senior Producer
Fabio D’Aguanno – Senior Digital Designer
Penn Li – Lead Digital Designer
Beau Thein – Digital Designer
Yosuke Ando – Digital Designer
Rafael Cardoso – Developer
Nathan Winch – Lead Developer
Allen Kelley – Developer
John Mitchell – Lead Developer
Justin Van Emmerik – Technical Director
Shaun Roberts – Digital Designer
Olan O’Mahony – Digital Designer
Fuji Staplehurst – Digital Designer
Karlee Weatherstone – Account Director
Tara Goh – Account Director
Max Bryden – Account Executive
10 Comments
that’s so 2008.
http://www.pokelondon.com/portfolio/balloonacy/
You cannot be serious, balloonacy was a major award winning campaign. Poor form ripping this idea off.
Shameless…i’m gobsmacked
Balloonacy and this are very different. The only similarity is that something is flying through the air. To do well in this game it seems as though you ask friends to support you and collect some kind of codes.
Balloonacy on the other hand required you to us controls to move a balloon from website to website to win a holiday. You had to paste html code into sites and move from one site to the next and from blog to blog.
The Optus idea is a simple face book app which looks to me like a clever competition entry mechanic.
Im gobsmacked at the ignorance of people on this blog…. The devils in the detail.
Now I think about it maybe they are the same.
They both are a race where the user controls a flying ballon/animal and they receive boosts from friends via social media.
Design and execution aint bad, shame on the concept, being inspired is one thing, but this is just a bad clone.
Plz vote for this elephant 🙂 Thanks
https://apps.facebook.com/optu​sairrace/gallery/680812441
We all knew this would turn out to be a big FAIL with the same winners over and over due to ill thought out terms and conditions. Look at the optus facebook page and go through the comments to see the discontent!
Terrible competition. Optus even banned me on the wall for questioning the winners. For someone in the industry that was terrible of them. Crap competition and crap people running the page.
sadly u cant control the elephant flying with arrows. only codes make you go faster. complete rubbish. Same top 3 all week