Rackspace provides managed hosting and managed email solutions. Its services include web hosting, data warehousing, hosting online applications and managed email hosting. Rackspace has built its reputation around a commitment to customer support, which it calls ‘Fanatical support’. The firm assigns substantial resources to creating and maintaining awareness, which is its key differentiator over competitors.
Thanks to ‘Fanatical support’, Rackspace enjoys an exceptionally high customer retention rate, a fact that it was keen to communicate to the widest possible audience of top-level hosting users.
Gets better with age
The campaign message was simple: once a Rackspace customer, defection is unlikely as ‘Fanatical support’ goes on forever. Humour and involvement brings messages alive, so Rackspace felt that an interactive viral campaign involving humour would reach the widest audience possible and direct people to the Rackspace website. It would be entertaining, memorable and encourage the users to involve friends and business associates.
The resulting concept was the ‘Old timer’s machine’, www.theoldtimersmachine.com, an online interactive programme which showed people what they would look like in 20 yers time – when they were still Rackspace customers. Users simply uploaded an image of themselves, a colleague, or searched Google for a famous or infamous stand in. The user, as the makeover artist, can then manipulate it using a series of simple tools to add grey hair, baldness, wrinkles and various outrageous accessories to mimic the effect of age.
Ridiculous and amusing images need an audience so the results were shared by users through numerous means including social community websites such as MySpace and Facebook as well as by forwarding the link by e-mail.
Spreading the news
Users of top-level hosting services such as mission-critical websites and internet applications enjoy daftness as much as anyone. A budget of £20,000 was allocated to cover the creation of the viral and email fulfilment and 2000 Rackspace customers from across Europe, the Middle East and Africa were selected to receive a link to the ‘Old timer’s machine’ by email. They were the seeds from which the campaign would spread to a much broader target audience. People told people, who then told others, many of whom were unfamiliar with the Rackspace brand, but whose future influence and word-of-mouth potential were significant.
Results
Within six months 25,000 people across the world had generated 162,866 page views, creating and sharing images of themselves with colleagues, friends and associates.
The number swelled as a result of personal referrals, links from referral sites such as stumpleupon.com (12,766 visits), coolsiteoftheday.com (1,730 visits) and social networking sites. The ‘machine’ was also located 964 times via Google. And people are still visiting.
Globally, the concept has crossed cultural and linguistic borders. The viral has been enjoyed by users in 112 countries including the United States, United Kingdom, Brazil, Canada, Sweden and Portugal, Australia, Ireland, Romania and Germany, giving a response rate of 1250 per cent.
Even though this was not a business generation exercise, Rackspace received the added bonus of an estimated £48,000 of new business attributable to clients assessing the Rackspace website fromt he viral. Over ten years such new business would generate £361,000 of new present value cash flow equating to an ROI of 1700 per cent.
Fabio Torlini, creative director of Rackspace, comments, “The ‘Old timer’s machine’ fitted in with our ethos and certainly made the point about us being Fanatical Forever. To spread a brand message this quickly and effectively shows the power of viral marketing when it’s done properly.”
