Question: How many scientists does it take to make a formula? Four thousand. Okay, so it’s not funny but it is the number of users the Invitrogen brand attracted to its platform game in its latest global campaign, ‘Challenge Lab’.
The campaign was put in the hands of creative digital agency Bourne who utilised on and offline methods to raise brand awareness for Invitrogen, a life sciences brand which produces a liquid solution used in laboratory experiments called Gibco.
‘Challenge lab’ was soft launched across EMEA in towards the end of last year. Adrian James, client services director of Bourne says, “We soft launched the campaign out of term-time so we could iron out any potential problems with the game.”
James says they didn’t make any major changes and the campaign launched in North America at the beginning of the year and will run across APAC from quarter two. The game is a Flash-based design and allows users to move across floating platforms. Within it there are three challenges, and each one is designed to test a specific skill, e.g. logic, memory and knowledge. The objective is to work your way through them all.
Scientists love Facebook too
The campaign was for a specialised audience of PhD science students and researchers. Invitrogen used contacts in its current database to send a DM to as it felt the audience wouldn’t be a regular recipient of mail and it would therefore resonate well with them. Emails containing a link to the game were also sent to existing contacts.
Social media sites were deemed to be an ideal way of reaching the target audience and were used to create buzz and promote the game further afield than the current database of customers. Bourne set up a Facebook fan page and a Twitter Page with the campaign name.
It also implemented a blogging outreach programme designed to identify online influencers and feed information to them in the hope they would write about the campaign and drive traffic back to the site.
Can I have your number?
Due to the intelligence of the audience the agency was careful not to make the game too trivial. James explains the competitive streak within the industry and says, “Lab guys like to compete so we created a leader board for all to view, we also tweet the results of the board and post it on our Facebook site.”
Despite targeting the students and researchers James explains it is the procurement departments in educational institutes who are responsible for the buying. It was hoped the students would stimulate demand as they are the end-users. He continues to explain how the brand was not looking for quantitative results such as a 10 per cent increase in purchase. Gibco is a ubiquitous product and Invitrogen just wanted to raise awareness and solicit mobile numbers.
Invitrogen noted the increased use of smartphones especially among the demographic of its end-users, aged 23-45. During the signing up process users are required to choose and personalise their avatar then enter details including email address and mobile number. James says, “We wanted this information so one day we could do some intimate one-to-one marketing campaigns.” So far Invitrogen has updated its CRM database with 2252 qualified mobile numbers.
Positive outcome
Any campaign with global reach takes a lot of strategic planning, especially as it would ordinarily involve translation, but James says, “It was a great economy of scale, with English being the primary language for a lot of scientific work we saved a lot on translation costs and didn’t have to change too much.”
As well as the previously mentioned phone numbers solicited and the number of users who signed up to play the game, the EMEA roll out lead to Invitrogen obtaining 70 active fans in the social media space. These people play the game on a regular basis and engage in online conversations about it frequently.
Di Foxx, senior market development manager of Life Technologies, the parent company of Invitrogen, is pleased with the data collected through the campaign. She says, “We have connected with our customers in a relaxed and open setting, collected valuable profile and behavioural data, and used the platform to improve awareness of our products and promotions.”
Bourne is working with Invitrogen to create a new set of games and see it eventually becoming a hand held game available to play via mobile phones whilst users are on the go.
