Mint Digital - WAW12
The Results: 2011
It’s been a long road, but we’re finally at the end. First of all, let me say I was really pleased with this years WaW. More than one WaW veteran mentioned that this may have been the best one yet, and I absolutely agree. Next year we’ll need to have one that’s a bit crap, or the bar might become too intimidating, but that’s a problem for another day. Today’s problem is to deliver the results to an eagerly awaiting audience of Mints. To give credit where it is due, and to heap scorn upon those who have been found wanting. It’s worth looking back at what we actually set out to do this year:
“In the history of Mint, we have been primarily focussed on [production]. We’ve either ignored [direct-to-consumer marketing] altogether, or we left it to our clients… This year, we’re going to make [marketing] the primary focus.”
When we put the brief together, there was some concern that we’d all be basically doing the same thing. I think we can all agree that that is not what happened. Three teams put together five campaigns, all of which were radically different. The lesson here is not to underestimate the imagination and creativity of the Mints. Not only that, but I think if we’d discussed it after the weekender, we’d have failed to predict which of the five campaigns was going to be the most effective. Through this contest, I’ve certainly learned a lot about marketing, as I’m sure all of you have, but more importantly, we’ve learned about marketing as an organization. This will prove enormously helpful in the future. I expect us to engage in similar campaigns both for our own products (stickygram, for example), for our business as a whole, and potentially for our clients. We’re not exactly the world’s #1 marketing department, but we’ve taken a step, and every attempt we make from here onwards will be less intimidating.
After the judging, the results looked like this:
Team Asimov
Design: 7.5 (a tie)
Tech: 10 (first place, primarily for quotagram)
Campaign: 10 (primarily for quizables)
Total: 27.5
Team Bradbury
Design: 7.5 (a tie)
Tech: 2.5 (share of second)
Campaign: 2.5 (share of second)
Total: 12.5
Team Coupland
Design: 0
Tech: 2.5 (share of second)
Campaign: 2.5 (share of second)
Total: 5
Now, this year was unusual in that we carried the competition forward a month, to let the campaigns work their magic, or utter lack thereof. There were 30 points in total available for the “proof of the pudding” award. The contest would ultimately be decided by the results of the campaigns. We all hustled over the last month to sign up as many users as we could, to spend our £1000 budgets, and to generally drive engagement with the site, and we certainly succeeded. Now, one can argue about whether or not a user who signs up to quotables to get their name on a high score list and win a set of Glee DVDs is truly an “engaged” user, (or enters a quote such as “give me an ipad any day all those apps” - thelma, or “happy valentines day snookums!” -bill). But one thing I’ve learned is that this is the nature of online marketing. You throw a lot of shit at the wall and you see what sticks.
So, without further ado, here are the results of the pudding award.
In third place, Team Coupland
User signups: 927
Quotes: 581
Loves: 871
Total points: 9270 + 1162 + 871 = 11303
I’m sorry team, but we just didn’t pull it off. I think perhaps our dreams may have been too lofty to achieve, and our strategy of hurling ipads at the problem, while effective, was insufficient. However, we did manage to overload debatabl.es to the point where we had an outage, which I’m pretty sure is a first for any webapp weekender project. If nothing else, we will have more empathy when we do the same damn thing to our customers. The following story will be of little use to the non-american Mints, but I’ll tell it anway. I went to college at Brown, which at the time had the 2nd worst (american) football team in the US. (Prairie View State was worse) We were horrible, and we had been horrible for all of living memory. However, a very popular poster amongst Brown students, and alums was this: http://bit.ly/fkfPi9 You see Brown went to the first ever Rose Bowl (for you Brits, this is a really big deal of a college football game, which would be impossible for Brown to compete in now). We were very proud of this fact, and we were able to completely ignore the fact that 1) We lost, 2) We were shut out, and 3) It wasn’t the first Rose Bowl by any stretch of the imagination, as the game had been going on for over 10 years, and been called the tournament of roses for two. So what consolation is this? Well Team Coupland? This year is the first year that the WaW has actually crowned a loser. We have made history. We are the first team in Mint history ever to lose a webapp weekender outright. Noone can take that away from us. There is no prize for third. Perhaps Matt can design us an appropriate poster.
In second place, Team Bradbury
The Bradbury offering, Quoto, was amazing. The cards were beautiful, and people loved them. I fear that you may have run into a bit of trouble with something that was too focussed on Valentine’s Day to make it through, but the execution was incredible, and you can all be proud of that. But how did it fare in terms of pudding?
Team B
User signups: 658
Quotes: 1141
Loves: 4277
Total points: 6580 + 2282 + 4277 = 13139
As you can see, Bradbury came up with somewhat fewer signups than Coupland, but a lot more Quotes and a LOT more loves, and that seems to have made the difference. Now you might ask yourself, how is this possible? Did 4200 people show up, love a quote, and then get themselves an ecard made? Well, no, probably not. In an amazing bit of lateral thinking, and at the last minute, Team Bradbury thought about what marketing really is, and came to the conclusion that actually, marketing need not involve other people, but in fact is something you can do entirely on your own, by entering quotes (about SxSW for example), and enlisting everyone on your team to love those quotes like they were a long lost brother. And love they did. They loved the shit out of those quotes. Now looking at the actual numbers, we don’t believe that this (herculean) effort actually made any difference in the outcome. So hats off to Team Bradbury for showing us that sometimes labor is its own reward. You have secured 10 points, which puts you in second place overall. You will receive commemorative WaW2011 runner up certificates to display proudly, AND this spectacular prize, which you will no doubt enjoy, as a team, because it’s thoughtfully tailored to the kinds of activities you find the most rewarding: http://amzn.to/ey84k4
And that leaves Team Asimov
What kind of crazy do you have to be to attempt three separate campaigns when you only have one designer, and an accountant hastily trained to use clip art? Crazy like a fox! Three solid campaigns in four days! Quotagram got us much love from the instagram guys, and has arguably had the most immediate value to Mint as a company, Quizables took off like a bat out o’ hell, as people even sadder than Paul Fedory when it comes to television watching desperately tried to claw their way to the top of a leaderboard in search of content they could probably just get off a torrent site more easily, and Please Release Me almost worked from a technical perspective, and generated a worldwide phenomenon that will confuse anyone who encounters it. Congratulations guys, you killed it. Let’s look at the numbers:
Team A
User signups: 2108
Quotes: 478
Loves: 687
Total points: 21080 + 956 + 687 = 22723
Wow. 2108 Users. That’ll do it. Team A wins the proof of the pudding award, which consists of… awww yeah. $240 worth of pudding (that’s a lotta puddin’).
In addition, this locks Team Asimov into first place overall. You will receive commemorative certificates that remove the “provisional” from the ones you already have, and you will go for a nice meal in London. New York based members of Team A will be flown to london for this purpose. Restaurant TBD.
So that’s another year in the books ladies and gentlemen. Thank you all for playing, and thanks for making this company a lot of fun.
-c
Cameron Price
CEO
