Gladeye and Zed Digital have been handed joint winner accolades for the second quarter round of Yahoo!Xtra’s Digital Strategy Award for the House of Travel’s mixandmatcher Facebook app, a campaign that gained 17,000 Facebook friends, 279,613 entries, half a million wall posts, 50,000 comments and thousands of comments posted directly onto the brand’s page.
“The campaign strategy was extremely relevant to this online platform, which is inherently social and viral. The viral aspect helped the brand achieve enormous reach and provided a depth of engagement that offline media simply could not offer,” says Laura Maxwell-Hansen, Yahoo!Xtra general manager and one of three judges.
Mixandmatch is a new, online-only brand developed by the House of Travel that offers consumers the ability to ‘mix and match’ different airlines to find the best deal on return flights.
“Using social media as the medium for the campaign reinforced the digital nature of the brand and was key to the success of the campaign,” says Maxwell-Hansen. “This strategy, combined with strong, relevant and genuinely engaging creative enabled the duo to leverage the inherent strengths of the channel and generate conversation and excitement around the brand.”
The campaign involved an online competition with one of 14 trips up for grabs for users and two Facebook friends. Friends and prizes had to be ‘mix-and-matched’ via a pokey machine like game interface.
Entries close for third quarter campaigns on November 12 and an overall annual winner will be chosen from the four quarterly winners, which will receive paid entry to CAANZ Best Use of Digital and $10,000 of media space on Yahoo!Xtra!
Speaking of Yahoo!Xtra, Nielsen Netratings stats have shown that it has been New Zealand’s favourite homepage for the past six months.
The homepage received over five million unique browsers in August, a 34 percent increase on July. And these ratings make its homepage audience 35 percent larger than any other New Zealand website.
Maxwell-Hansen attributes the growth in audience to an increase in awareness of Yahoo!Xtra amongst New Zealanders.
“Since it was formed over three years ago, Yahoo!Xtra has grown its audience, due to its range of online services, which includes the best of local and global news, mail, web search, Flickr and social networking tools. We now reach more than one in two Kiwis on our Yahoo! network.
We’re firmly established as a favourite site for New Zealanders to keep up to date and connected to what matters to them most. Our focus over the next six months will be to continue this growth by introducing more exciting new products at the end of 2010 and in early 2011.”
