With a limited budget and timeframe, the campaign, “Tudder, ‘Tinder’ for Cows” was a smash hit that attracted both farmers and global media attention. Kavita Singh connected with Jon Lonsdale, CEO of winning company, Octopus Group, to talk about the Tinder-inspired livestock app.
About the campaign
“Tudder, Tinder for cows” for the startup Hectare Agritech, was set up as a Tinder-style livestock app for farmers to swipe ‘right’ on cattle. Their aim was to grow subscribers to Hectare Agritech’s online site: SellMyLivestock. Hectare wanted to communicate that farming could be a profitable business as online livestock trading is just one way of working more efficiently.
With a budget of only £22,500 and a timeframe of about a month, the campaign aimed to hit three distinct objectives.
Objectives
- To raise awareness of the opportunities for farmers to trade livestock online by using data intelligently
- To grow subscribers to the SellMyLivestock platform, which allows farmers to find and trade livestock
- To gauge international appetite for online livestock trading in key markets such as the US, Europe and Australia
Results
A month-long programme of proactive media engagement generated awareness, direct engagement with the campaign app, and led to a dramatic increase in subscribers to the SellMyLivestock platform.
- 1,037 global print media mentions
- 30+ global broadcast segments
- 1.3bn print media reach
- 5,600 social media mentions
- 157m Twitter reach and 385m impressions
- 18,000+ downloads across Apple and Google app stores
- Tudder ranked among the top 10 business apps during launch week
- 30% uplift in SellMyLivestock traffic during the coverage
- 58% increase in new user registrations compared to previous six-month average
The campaign was seen on popular American outlets like Conan and The Late Late Show with James Corden, as well as publications such as Beef Magazine and Farmers Weekly.
At the last B2B Marketing Awards, the Octopus Group and its client Hectare Agritech, won Gold in four categories, including ‘Best use of public relations’, ‘Best limited budget campaign’, ‘Best SME-targeted campaign’ and the Grand Prix. So we spoke with the agency’s CEO, Jon Lonsdale, about how the campaign came to be such a smashing success.
Can you tell me how “Tudder ‘Tinder for cows’” was first conceived?
JL: We started working for Hectare Agritech in the summer of 2018. We don’t have that much experience with technology in agriculture to be honest, so it was a really new area for the agency to work in. Hectare’s CEO, Doug Bairner, and CTO, Jamie McInnes, both had roles in B2C marketing before the company started, so were quite creative to begin with. They’re the type of clients up for taking a few risks. One of the first things they did was send us a photograph with some whiteboard notes because they had already had a bit of a brainstorming session on things that they might want to try. There was one little bullet point that read: “Tinder?”
And of course, when we sat down with them, we asked about it. Jamie and Doug were in the pub chatting about the fact that part of their website, called Sell My Livestock, is quite analogous to Tinder. Through it, they match the genetic makeup of a bull or cow to make the perfect mating partner. So it was even better than Tinder, where you swipe on a picture or photograph and a load of rubbish that people write — this was actually based on genetics. We thought it was a really funny way of thinking. It germinated from there. Hectare is a really small client of ours from a financial perspective, so we said we’re happy to get this designed and go through a process with them.
What was the timeline you were working to?
JL: We planned for about four or five months, and we were really trying to figure out how to carry out the idea for this app. After we got back from Christmas, in 2019, Jamie said he had a bit of time to play around with the app. He showed us a version of it, and it was brilliant, right down to the mooing when you swiped right. We all agreed, it had to launch on Valentine’s Day. This was all in January, so we had four to five weeks to get everything done. We didn’t have tons of money and frankly we thought it might not work, but that it would be a great awareness campaign anyway. Even a couple of days before we launched the campaign, we were doing photoshoots on the farm so everything came together at the last minute.
A big part of the campaign was about linking technology and farming. Was it a challenge to develop that message?
JL: Definitely! One of the things we learned about farmers is that there are only about 140,000 in the UK, so it’s actually a small group. They’re very independent, and they don’t like to be made fun of. So we were quite worried that we might upset farmers by doing this. They might think we were mocking them. The way we overcame that was by making sure we shined a light on the challenges that farmers were facing and putting ourselves in their shoes. Everyone might think they’re really rich but they’re actually in a challenging environment with Brexit. A lot of farmers go out of business every year. If you think about some of the technology that’s used to grow crops and used in farms, it’s actually quite advanced, so we really tried to empathise with them and break that stereotype of what farming really entails.
Tell me about the media attention the campaign received
JL: We managed to place the story in the Sunday Times with one of the journalists we know. We also sent Valentine’s Day cards as a PR strategy, and it really paid off. Bloomberg got hold of the story and it went nuts from there. We had thousands of pieces of coverage, one of the key things that really drove it globally was that we sent a TV crew to film Hectare and some of its customers, and they did a two minute segment which was syndicated to every TV news channel out there. It went on all the main TV channels globally. After that, the American networks got hold of it and they loved it.
Social media kicked off and all sorts of crazy stuff was happening, like people dressing up as cows. Honestly, it was quite crazy. While it was obviously humourous, we were serious about the mix of technology and farming, and we wanted to get that across. We wanted to make sure we weren’t seen as a big joke. So we had to work quite hard to make sure the serious story – about why tech is a solution for struggling farmers – was something the media was really hot on. Thankfully that worked. A lot of the press was from business news outlets, they were about farming as an industry, and how it is being revolutionised by technology or e-commerce companies like Hectare.
What are some lessons you’ve learned from this experience?
JL: One lesson was that there’s still a place for traditional media channels. You alway hear that everything is digital these days. We could have done this as a digital campaign, but I don’t think it would have had anywhere near the impact it did. Digital was important, but there weren’t a ton of digital assets until influencers started noticing. We did some traditional ways of promoting, like PR instead. We didn’t spend millions like some of other award-winning campaigns, yet its impact was massive, so I think it’s a reminder that you don’t actually need a big budget to come up with great ideas. That’s good for agencies to know.
