Source: Fakty, TVN
Cityschool Training Centre (Warsaw, Poland). The centre provides secondary and high school final exams preparation courses, as well as university entry exams, language and professional courses, all targeted at young people aged 15-25 (teenagers and young adults).
To attract new clients and increase the number of students enrolling for the courses; to increase brand awareness and drive mainstream attention; to create buzz and build more traffic on the Client's corporate website.
Source: Gazeta.pl
Roman Giertych was Poland's Minister of Education. He represented the extreme right wing of the political scene, fanatical catholic movement and is a huge advocate of "iron hand" (some even called it "terror") methods of governing schools and the whole Polish education system. Fighting against gay rights, sex, even clubbing and other civil liberties caused that he's undoubtedly infamous among younger generations of Poles.
Prior to the campaign that we developed for our Client, Roman Giertych quite unexpectedly, had come up with a new law that allowed some of the students who hadn't passed their final high school exams (called "matura" in Poland) to be granted the matura certificate.
The move that was obviously meant to bring him more popularity among high-school students turned out to be not only extremely controversial but brought a huge wave of criticism from academic staff and even the students themselves. They didn't want anyone, Giertych in particular, to help them through their exams and give them any unfair advantage.
Source: Gazeta Wyborcza
Having conducted thorough research on the subject, we figured out we could base the whole campaign for our Client on this hot topic. We agreed to provide an integrated marketing campaign. We picked viral marketing, buzz, branded entertainment plus a few BTL tools. First, we invented the meme "Don't Count On Roman" encapsulating the essence of the planned communication.
We designed and developed a microsite http://www.nielicznaromana.org comprising:
- two funny animations that were spread virally in the internet
- an online flash game (Giertych's voice emulator) that allowed players to construct their own "Roman's speech" (vocabulary consisted of the Minister's very own words), that could be totally ridiculous and / or controversial
- an online contest based on the "Roman's speech" game
- "how to pass the exam" button linking to the landing page on our Client's website
- e-gadgets (screensavers and wallpapers ready for downloading)
We designed and produced other means of marketing communication as well:
- flyers, leaflets and posters with the meme "Don't Count On Roman", Roman's cartoon (that did, although not in a direct and evident way, due to the legal reasons, resemble the real character) and the link to the microsite - they were distributed at schools across Warsaw
- t-shirts and caps (there was a huge demand for them later coming from the website visitors)
Drag and drop the phrases onto the grey play bar below and press play.
Source: NieLiczNaRomana.org, speech generator
- buzz around the campaign resulting in up to 7000 unique visitors to the microsite daily
- more than 1000 records in Google - positive buzz in the internet news and on forums and blogs
- free national and local media coverage (organic PR) by the most popular TV and radio stations (Fakty TVN, Radiostacja) as well as newspapers and websites (Gazeta Wyborcza, Gazeta.pl)
- more than 3000 "Roman's speech" contestants
- traffic on the Client's corporate website increased 18 times