Adnerds

Our Flash Geeks (all under 25) came back from a weekend in the Belgian Ardennes with lots of stories about what they’re usually up to in their free time. Your guess was right: in their free time, they’re just as  well geeks. They do things like e.g. develop a controller for Flash. Which, totally geeky as it may sound, is quite interesting if you think about it. And very inspiring.

As we started dwelling on the idea we soon came to this conclusion: nobody has a controller for Flash, but everybody does have Flash. So why not turn it the other way round and develop a website which lets you control something in the real world. And that is how our idea for the new Pepsi Max campaign came about.

We actually rented 6 real claw machines and hooked them up to the internet. We looked at it and thought it was really cool. But there was still room for improvement. This is 2009, the year in which one can leverage the viral power of social platforms, right?

So we added Facebook Connect to the mix. This way, registering is really easy. Whatever you do on Pepsimax.be ends up in your friends’ newsfeed. And as we are giving you play codes you can give to your friends, very soon they get actively involved as well.

But only six claw machines and literally hundreds of people yearning to play each and every moment? Well, you can have a look at the stats to determine when is a better time to come back. Or you can follow our claw machines on Twitter where they update their status as they become free.

And how do you know if you’ve won? The claw machines are filled with little fluffy toy bears. Each of them has an RFID tag inside. Whenever someone grabs a bear it gets dropped and glides past an RFID reader. So we can instantly tell you what it is you have won.

Mind you, this is an awful lot of technology. And everyone familiar with building stuff like this knows that at any given time anything can go wrong. Yet, we are fanatic enough to build campaigns like this. Because we like living on the edge? In a sense, yes. But mainly because we prefer thrilling, innovative campaigns and every risk they entail over boring stuff that nobody cares about. We’ve been sweating over it. A lot.  And we still are. But we would choose to do it all over again tomorrow. In a blink.

As of yet, the campaigning for pepsimax.be has only just started. And up till now, we only had an informal and extremely pleasant contact with some Belgian influencers. If you want to read what 2 of them have been writing about it, just click their names.

Imke Dielen
Clo Willaert

Or if you’d like to see a behind the scenes (and have proof that it is the REAL stuff), check out our Qik video on the MaxIt behind the Scenes blog.

Enjoy.