DDB UK Homepage

DDB UK has created three infographic films with the acclaimed information designer and Information is Beautiful author David McCandless, to highlight the FT’s position in the US as a truly global provider of business news.

The animated infographic films will report global business stories in a simple and compelling way.  During the 3-day event, spanning 27^th, 28^th and 29^th March, the films will be projected in 3-D on to the wall of the Vanderbilt Hall at Grand Central Station in New York between 7am-9pm.

The infographics, which are graphic visual representations of information, and data, were developed by David McCandless, acclaimed data journalist and information designer, and author of Information is Beautiful. The projections were created by KLIP Collective, based in Philadelphia, who are leaders in the field of 3-D projection mapping and the Illustrations for the animation were created by George Myers.

The campaign strapline, ‘Stay on Top of the World’ underlines the FT’s position as a leading global business news provider.

New York commuters are able to interact with the films in order to explore the stories in greater detail, via a touch-sensitive floor mat.  The three topics are, The US and the Global Economy, The Growth of Mobile Technology revolution and the Global Recovery.  The topics reflect the typically important, global stories that the FT covers in-depth every day. 

The 3 films will also be live on a campaign microsite. Here, people will be able to share the films and also their views about the stories themselves.  They will also have the opportunity to access more in-depth coverage of the topics, and familiarise themselves with FT content, via links to relevant sections of FT.com.

The campaign is also supported by online banner campaign and OOH screens in Times Square as well as running on Taxi screens throughout NYC.   

Simon Richings, Digital Creative Director at DDBUK said:  “We are delighted to have created such an innovative campaign in partnership with a world-renowned title.  The direct contact and feedback with the FT’s consumers is key to the campaign’s success and we are thrilled that we are able to create such scale and impact in speaking directly to this discerning audience in such an iconic location.”

22 March 2012

DDB UK and Volkswagen announced the availability of the Golf GTI Edition 35 in theUK with a new campaign that celebrates 35 years of the much loved and iconic model by turning it into a ‘time machine’ and sending it back through the decades.

The online and experiential campaign launched in October with a live event staged at the Truman Brewery in East London, and hosted by TV presenter and racing driver Amanda Stretton. Spectators watched as two engineers clambered into the GTI ‘time machine’ and accelerated towards a wall, only to see it vanish in front of their very eyes and apparently reappear at Volkswagen’s German headquarters in Wolfsburg in 1976.

The event has been made into a viral film which is being broadcast on the Volkswagen UK Facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/VolkswagenUK) and seeded to a wide range of blogs and websites. 

However, the event itself marks only the beginning of the journey; over the next four weeks, fans will be able to follow the story of the Golf GTI and its two intrepid engineers on Facebook as they make their way back through the decades, dropping in on a range of historic moments along the way. Their adventures will be documented through a series of daily posts from the front line of time travel – a mix of film footage, competitions and photographs. 

The campaign has been created by DDB UK with the live event and videos produced by Passion Raw.

 Jeremy Craigen, Executive Creative Director, DDB UK commented: “What I love most about this campaign is that we have avoided being unduly reverential when it comes to marking this milestone in the history of Volkswagen’s most iconic car; instead, the campaign is both irreverent and totally inclusive – two characteristics that are entirely in keeping with the original philosophy behind the GTI.”

Nigel Brotherton, National Communications Manager at Volkswagen said: “What we love about the GTI time travel campaign is that it not only reflects the unique personality and heritage of the brand but our creative relationship with DDB. The event perfectly celebrated the heritage of our much loved GTI, while warmly welcoming the new Edition 35 to theUK.”

14 November 2011

People have always been fascinated by the weather but their interest is set to reach new heights in Ireland this summer with the launch of Budweiser Ice Cold Index. To drive trials of Bud Ice Cold in an innovative way and own summer, the key season for beer sales, DDB UK have developed a revolutionary participation platform ‘The Bud Ice Cold Index’. The centrepiece is an innovative mobile app that utilises cutting edge e-vouchering technology that matches real Irish temperatures to the offers Irish consumers receive off their pint.

The Budweiser Ice Cold Index means that on days reaching 20°C and over, consumers will enjoy a free pint.  There will be €2 off when it’s 18°C or 19°C outside, and for 16°C or 17°C weather, there will be €1 off at participating Index bars. You can check the day’s offer via the App which will update you on the temperature of your region each day at 1pm. Simply put, the hotter the day the less you pay.

By using daily weather feeds and linking a discount at the bar directly to the weather, Bud Ice Cold are not just talking at the consumers but making them an active part of the campaign by encouraging them to download and engage with the app before passing it on to friends.

Budweiser Ice Cold Index will be supported by a heavyweight ATL summer campaign  which includes outdoor, print, radio, online, POS and TV. Shot on location in Cape Town and directed by James Rouse, the TV ad features the Bud Ice Cold Index Weatherman Scott Campbell on a beach location explaining the concept of Index. With participation at the core of the campaign, the weatherman we’ll be delivering daily news, competitions, Index updates and invitations to the hottest events throughout the summer on the Facebook page.

31 July 2011

Volkswagen is currently focusing on value - specifically the widely held, erroneous belief that their cars are more expensive than most of their competitors. They wanted to show that, over time, Volkswagens almost always work out to be cheaper. This was an awareness message that needed to reach beyond the people who were thinking about car purchases in the near future.

We created a miniature interactive village through which visitors could roughly calculate the long term costs of various aspects of their life: family, fun, holidays, food, home and of course, a Volkswagen car. The aim was to show that the little things really do add up over time, and that Volkswagen is on the case. Once calculated, visitors can share and compare their surprising results with Facebook friends.

The beautifully detailed village was shot using a tilt-shift style to exaggerate the small scale feel. Multiple camera passes allowed us to incorporate the streets and buildings into an interactive environment that users can move through as they explore the cost of living their lifetime.

The site is a great way for Volkswagen to engage with people in a fun and interesting way while addressing the complex subject of the whole life costs of owning and running a car.

30 July 2011

Brief
MONOPOLY’s brand essence is all about negotiation. Those players that are best at negotiation, are best at MONOPOLY. So, our brief was to amplify this brand value whilst also bringing to life Hasbro’s latest release, MONOPOLY City, through an intense, rewarding and social experience for MONOPOLY players.

Solution
We created the biggest online game of MONOPOLY ever.  A global online campaign that takes the game into the real world with a live worldwide game of MONOPOLY, using Google Maps to turn the globe into one giant game board!

First, we started momentum in the campaign by creating a competition for MONOPOLY fans to design their own MONOPOLY building using Google SketchUp to be included in the game. The community then voted for the top 3 designs which were included in the game. The game then went live and, armed with $3 million in virtual cash players purchase and construct MONOPOLY buildings on any street in the world. They earn rent from their properties and can increase the earning potential of their streets by adding schools, eco-friendly parks and much more.  With Chance Cards, players can sabotage their opponents by erecting prisons or sewage plants, negating all rent on a street, and even demolish buildings altogether. The campaign ended on 9th December with overwhelming results.

Results
•  It now ranks in the top 20 biggest online games in the US by UVs
•  Over 17 million visits to date
*  1.4 million active registered players
*  Over 5 million unique visitors to date
*  15 billion dynamic page impressions per month
*  70% of visitors spent 10+ minutes per visit, 50% spent half an hour or more
*  Total streets bought 8,927,643
*  Total buildings built 175,002,384, a new building element of the game
*  Number of negotiations 11,974,870

5 June 2011

Challenge
The Golf GTI is an icon – the original hot hatch, loved by pre-family, affluent men. They’re urban, style-conscious ‘early adopters’, the kind of people who know their brands and what they stand for. They love driving and care about the performance of their car over ostentation. We needed to find an original and captivating way to attract these men and get them experiencing the new GTI VI.

Solution
Our approach was to bring the fun of driving the new GTI VI to life.  We created The GTI Project: a game that allows people to relive the boyish fun of their youths by tapping into the nostalgia of when they first learnt to love driving. Inspired by the true story behind the car’s history: the first GTI was built in secret by Volkswagen engineers in their spare time, purely out of a love for performance motoring. The project features a restricted access workroom in the Volkswagen factory, where an extraordinary 30ftx25ft Scalextric racetrack has been built. Between the 200 buildings of a gleaming model city, the GTI engineers are racing their new car in miniature, no less fine-tuned and expertly engineered than its full size counterpart. Players can become immersed in the familiar Scalextrics race; taking control, crashing round corners, setting their own fast lap, then challenging their friends to do better. This virtual track engages people with the real emotional reward of a GTI, not that it’s flashy, but that it’s fun. Ultimately, it’s about the thrill of driving – something that GTI engineers and drivers seem to understand instinctively. This all-digital launch campaign comprised social media outreach, email activity, rich media online ads and traffic drivers on www.volkswagen.co.uk all driving to the GTI Project microsite.

Impact
• The site generated over five million page views.
• 167,439 registered players, spending an average of eight minutes on the site.
• The site exploded across a multitude of online communities, with our outreach resulting in over 279,500 sites now linking to the microsite.
• Sites like drivers-republic took it a step further, creating their own custom league competitions on the GTI Project, with attractive prizes like a day at Millbrook test-driving the new GTI under professional racer supervision.
• Posts and comments range from Portuguese to Polish, Twitter generated a huge social buzz with tweets like ‘Best interactive marketing that I’ve seen in ages!’ and ‘I love websites that are not a simple click and view, enjoy GTI Project’.
• Most importantly, this all-digital campaign met its ambitious sales targets within one month of the car’s launch.

16 May 2011

Challenge
Volkswagen wanted people to experience the ’simply effortless’ Tiguan for themselves.

Solution
We decided to use social media to turn ordinary individuals into influential brand advocates, by creating a competition in which we searched for a new kind of car critic - The People’s Reviewer.

Over 1000 people applied via YouTube video auditions and email entries. We selected nine contestants, divided them into three heats, and gave each aTiguan for a week to try out its features and record a short video review. These were posted on the People’s Reviewer site where the public voted for their favourite. The competition culminated in a final between the winners of each of the three heats.

To help the contestants win votes we taught them how to tell their story and generate support using social media tools: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Flickr. They were a quick study!

This is a real example of a campaign that leverages the power of social media with an off-line experience, whilst being bolstered by a traditional media spend. The People’s Reviewer demonstrated the enormous potential of social media when embraced by major brands, even in these early experimental days. In undertaking the campaign, Volkswagen has broken new ground for the way UK car brands can and will connect with the public.

Impact
• 251,411 site visits
• 6,834 participants (votes, sign-ups, entrants)
• 1,019 entrants
• Over 1,000 followers on twitter
• Over 50,000 video views
• 2.2 million reach through social media [excluding paid advertising figures]
…and one People’s Reviewer

10 January 2011

Brief
Hasbro had a new brand positioning. This year the classic Trivial Pursuit had a makeover with six new question styles allowing for faster and more exciting game-play. Hasbro wanted to communicate this to audiences in a way that would re-engage them and encourage sales in the all important Christmas run-up.

We needed to come up with a way to engage the audience and drive awareness by provoking participation. Trivial Pursuit Experiment was created to support this launch, after all playing in teams is better, because no-one knows everything!

Solution
A fun and addictive game that reveals your inner genius by pitting Men versus Women across the world in nine languages to discover once and for all, who is the smartest sex! Players can also create banter cards to send to their friends, the perfect way to enlist more players for your side, or to have a dig at the opposition! Because we all have days when our inner genius is hiding, we created the Trivial Pursuit Wedgie awards: send in your favourite clips of real life mistakes and we’ll share the winners every week. All of these features can be experienced on the demo site.

Results
• The Experiment finished on 22^nd February 2010. It was a very close call with scores changing in real time, but like most games, only one side can win.
• The game ended with a world-wide score of a staggering 15,121,731 questions asked and answered.
• This means it would take an individual over 3500 non-stop days or 9 years, 215 days, 8 hours and 24 minutes exactly to answer all the questions, with no sleep or breaks!
• The final scores were massive: Women 4,088,139 : Men 4,077,596. Congratulations women of the world, bragging rights are yours forever!
• Interestingly, the women did best in Entertainment (56.8% correctly answered) and the men did best in Science & Nature ( 57% correctly answered)
• The second experiment, Battle of the Generations, started mid March.

The website is part of a wider campaign that includes viral, online display, social media and PR co-developed with an unnamed US based agency.

8 June 2010