World Cup Avatars Case Study:

Twitter & Facebook Twibbons

Project Case Study: August 27, 2010

_____________________________________________________________________________
AdHack Media Inc. | James Sherrett | AdHack.com
+1 877 477 5697 | james@adhack.com
1.0 Overview of the Project
The AdHack team wanted to experiment with new creative technologies and
distribution channels. We also wanted to create a case study to share with
clients on how to use digital gestures, identity creation and content to build
brand participation and to spread messages.

So we created the World Cup 2010 Avatars fan activation campaign.

We collaborated on the project with our friends at Capulet Communications.

We chose to run our campaign for the World Cup Finals, since the World Cup
is the largest sporting event in the world, invoking passionate responses and
national loyalties from global soccer fans.

To run the experiment, we created ‘twibbons’ – avatar image additions for all
32 national teams playing in the World Cup.

On the Twibbon website we uploaded the avatar images – flag and soccer ball.
Twibbon converted those images to image layers so any member of Twitter and
Facebook could add our images to their avatar in a few simple clicks.

See all our twibbon avatars on twibbon.com/adhack and AdHack.

In 4.0 Project Lessons and Opportunities below we list our lessons learned and
provide guidance on how to succeed with future avatar activation campaigns
on Twitter and Facebook.

We launched our World Cup campaign on June 4. The World Cup launched on
June 11 and ended on July 11 with Spain defeating Netherlands.

_____________________________________________________________________________
AdHack Media Inc. | James Sherrett | AdHack.com
+1 877 477 5697 | james@adhack.com
2.0 Project Execution
Creating Twibbon Avatars
In researching how to execute the campaign we saw that the majority of
adoption of twibbons was on Twitter.

We wondered why but soon had an answer. Adding a twibbon to a Twitter

avatar was a 2-click process. Adding a twibbon to a Facebook avatar took
about 6 steps and required participants to change their default profile image.

So we decided to focus our efforts on getting our twibbons used on Twitter

avatars. We built the corresponding images accordingly, scaling their design
primarily to the default Twitter avatar size: 57 pixels square. We also created
Facebook avatar images at 200 pixels square.

Both twibbon sizes had to work with a variety of avatar images and had to be
prominent without obscuring the main avatar image. We opted to frame the
bottom of the avatar and placed the national flag of the team across the bottom
of the avatar image with a representative soccer ball in the bottom right corner.

We uploaded all the images to the Twibbon website and used keyword-rich
copy, titles and descriptions to maximize their chances of being found.

Connecting to World Cup Soccer Fans

Now that we had something for World Cup soccer fans to do we had to reach
out to them to build awareness and get some early social proof and momentum
for the campaign.

Our first step was building a landing page on AdHack where anyone could see
all 32 World Cup avatars in one view. We used the built in embed code from
Twibbon and created a simple page – World Cup 2010 Twibbons for All
Countries.

We optimized the landing page on AdHack to appear in search engines for

relevant searches. We also created a shortened link to the page through Bit.ly,
which you can see here.

_____________________________________________________________________________
AdHack Media Inc. | James Sherrett | AdHack.com
+1 877 477 5697 | james@adhack.com
 Our second step was adding the twibbons to our personal Twitter avatars –
@dbarefoot and @sherrett. Then we shared the campaign with some close
friends. Soon we had a few dozen people with our twibbons on their avatars.

In addition, the Twibbon website had a built-in mechanism for promotion.

When any new participant added a twibbon to their avatar they were given the
option of tweeting (posting to Twitter) about their new avatar with a link for
their followers to check out.

Lastly, we struck a contra deal for some media placement. We wrote match
synopsis reports for SoccerBlog.com in exchange for banner ad placement in
their sidebar.

For all 3 of these tactics we tracked response rates and made corresponding
estimates at how those responses led to participation in the campaign – adding
our twibbons to their avatars.

We tracked how people used the avatar overlays and how the course of the
tournament affected usage. We tracked how different national teams were
chosen prior to the tournament and how different teams were chosen once the
eliminations began.

_____________________________________________________________________________
AdHack Media Inc. | James Sherrett | AdHack.com
+1 877 477 5697 | james@adhack.com
3.0 Project Results

World Cup Avatar Activations

Over the month of the World Cup we had 4,182 of our Twibbon avatars added
to individuals’ Twitter and Facebook accounts. We collected the avatar
distribution statistics on a weekly basis every Monday.

The distribution of avatars was of particular interest to us – some countries had

heavy use early, others had heavy use late, some had no use at all – so we’ve
included the full data here, sorted by the final top team: Netherlands.

Team June 7 Jun 14 June 21 June 28 July 5 July 12

Netherlands 63 692 860 901 970 1088
Spain 92 318 416 479 569 938
Germany 54 306 342 369 401 433
Australia 5 208 235 240 243 244
Italy 62 160 193 212 212 212
Brazil 29 103 143 164 179 181
South Africa 14 107 149 154 163 167
USA 8 81 117 142 143 143
Portugal 17 78 103 122 136 137
Argentina 12 55 72 86 95 95
Uruguay 7 19 27 36 68 88
Mexico 15 55 72 82 83 83
Serbia 5 61 70 74 75 75
Denmark 18 58 62 64 64 64
Japan 0 27 40 49 51 51
South Korea 2 26 46 49 50 50
France 1 20 37 37 37 38
Slovenia 1 10 17 20 21 21
Cameroon 1 13 17 18 18 18
New Zealand 0 0 2 17 17 17
Switzerland 3 6 9 10 11 11

_____________________________________________________________________________
AdHack Media Inc. | James Sherrett | AdHack.com
+1 877 477 5697 | james@adhack.com
 Team June 7 Jun 14 June 21 June 28 July 5 July 12
Ghana 0 0 0 2 9 10
Ivory Coast 3 3 9 9 9 9
Slovakia 0 2 4 6 6 6
Chile 0 0 1 2 2 2
Algeria 0 0 0 0 1 1
Greece 0 0 0 0 0 0
Nigeria 0 0 0 0 0 0
Honduras 0 0 0 0 0 0
North Korea 0 0 0 0 0 0
Paraguay 0 0 0 0 0 0
Totals 412 2408 3043 3344 3633 4182

Word of Mouth Participation

In addition to direct participations through adding our twibbon images to their
avatars, fans activated through Word-of-Mouth Participation – through blog
posts, video views, Twitter tweets, Facebook posts, YouTube videos, comments
and digital engagement.

We did not track Word of Mouth Participation. But for any client we would
recommend tracking Word of Mouth Participation because it provides greater
insight that analytics and stats alone.

We believe in tracking Word of Mouth Participation so much that we’ve built

the AdHack Digital Curation Platform to specifically track Word of Mouth
Participation and its effect on overall brand participation and conversions.

_____________________________________________________________________________
AdHack Media Inc. | James Sherrett | AdHack.com
+1 877 477 5697 | james@adhack.com
4.0 Project Lessons and Opportunities
Project Lessons
Below is a short summary of lessons learned during the World Cup avatars fan
activation campaign. The list is by no means exhaustive but does provide some
good shortcuts for anyone seeking to do activation through avatars.

1. Enlist the technology provider. Twibbon.com was hosting a promotion with

the UK TV station ITV – who had the same idea we had – to create twibbons
for all 32 World Cup teams. ITV partnered with Twibbon for promotion. We
learned this after we had created our twibbons, when our England avatar
disappeared from the site because ITV had an exclusive deal with Twibbon.

2. Be ready early for date-driven events. We saw the biggest adoption of our
avatars in the opening week of the World Cup. If we’d had the avatars ready
earlier we feel we would have started seeing adoption earlier. It’s important
to have early adoption because of the network effects of peer-to-peer
sharing, the tipping effect of social proof on social behaviors and how
incumbents are hard to displace for an ingrained position.

3. Pay for the right tools. We used the free version of Twibbon for our
campaign. The paid version provides better statistics and promotion tools as
well as a contractual relationship with the vendor that would have brought
our conflict with ITV (lesson #1 above) to light.

4. Peer-to-peer sharing tops conversion sources. When anyone added one of

our twibbon avatars they also had the opportunity to post a pre-created
message to their social network proclaiming their support. Many of our users
did this and it was our top source of campaign discovery and new adoption.

5. Optimize the campaign for searches. Since Google (and other search
engines) provide the main interface for web users to find information, ensure
your web pages can be found. This equation is partially building pages
properly to be discovered and partially creating a linking strategy to get
those pages highly ranked in search results.

6. Build long-tail on-ramps. Don’t force all users to go through the homepage
but build out specific pages for predictable entrances. In this case we should
have build a page for each national team in addition to the single page listing
_____________________________________________________________________________
AdHack Media Inc. | James Sherrett | AdHack.com
+1 877 477 5697 | james@adhack.com
 all avatars. We could have also built a landing page in each country’s native
language for indexing in search engines and conversions.

7. Facebook and Twitter each require their own approach. In its simplest form,
Facebook is hard and expensive, Twitter is fast and cheap. But there’s more
to it. Facebook has a huge audience and built-in viral mechanisms that boost
campaigns. Twitter has an open architecture that promotes a decentralized
distribution and interactions. Each venue requires its own consideration,
strategy and execution tactics for success.

Opportunities
In addition to the lessons we learned in the campaign we wanted to be able to
share some opportunities we saw emerge for future extensions to this campaign
or for other campaigns that use avatars or twibbons and ask participants to add
them as identity tokens.

1. Create special and scarce avatars. This makes the avatars more valuable,
exclusive and meaningful.

2. Use avatars as rewards. This also makes the avatars more exclusive and
meaningful and allows participants to display them as achievement markers.

3. Integrate avatars with larger marketing efforts. Our campaign suffered from
a dead end when the World Cup tournament had ended and the final had
been played. Finding ways for participants to continue to interact with our
brand provides ongoing communication opportunities.

4. Create a dynamic avatar creator. This could be for anyone or just for special
fans who had achieved a certain level. In this case we imagined an
animated .gif file which would show personalized aspects, like a fan’s
national uniform (kit) with their preferred number and name.

Call to Action
If any of this campaign sounds of interest to you, AdHack is ready to custom
design a campaign of digital brand activation for your brand.

Talk to us and get started with the top team of digital doers out there – http://
adhack.com and 1-877-477-5697.

_____________________________________________________________________________
AdHack Media Inc. | James Sherrett | AdHack.com
+1 877 477 5697 | james@adhack.com