Advergaming campaign for Intouch Russia

Novocortex created an advergame for Intouch Insurance Russia. We often use online games and game-banners in our Dutch campaigns, because they deliver higher click rates and lower costs per click.We were thrilled to see whether our game-banner would have the same effect in Russia. The most popular Russian sites are overloaded with banners, some have more than 10 banners on a home page:-0. And they impose restrictions on the banner content, such as max. size of 15 KB and no interaction in a banner:-(.

01 Results

Fortunately, campaign results exceeded our expectations and were much better than results of comparable Dutch campaigns. The game-banner of Intouch ran on 12 websites and its average click rate was 2.7%, with a peak of7.75%. Yes - 7.75%, we have checked it in Google Analytics. And people who clicked on the banner spent at least 1 minute on the campaign page of Intouch.

02 Behavioural and contextual targeting

The secret was in the use of behavioural and contextual targeting, and in the engaging and interactive banner content. Let's start with targeting and media planning (done by Novocortex in co-operation with OMD Mediaplan Russia). In order to make the ad as relevant for internet users as possible, we picked the sites where Russians search for new cars, read about car insurance or view maps with traffic jams. We chose banner positions that would deliver high click rates (after about 20 online campaigns you learn what positions work and what don't:-). Plus, we used behavioural targeting on Odnoklassniki.ru, the most popular social network in Russia. The banner was shown only to the people who had previously visited insurance sites or had searched for "car insurance" on Yandex (the nr. 1 search engine in Russia).

03 Gamevertising

We embedded an online racing game into the banner, because interactive banners draw much more attention and deliver more clicks than boring and static banners. The game advertised a new service of Intouch - the replacement car (Intouch was the first insurance company in Russia to offer this service). The game explains that if your car can't drive after an accident, Intouch will provide you with a replacement car.

04 Reactions by Russian internet users

One of the sites where we placed the banner was Autokadabra.ru, a car blog platform based on user generated content. Readers of Autokadabra immediately commented on a blonde behind the wheel and on the crossing geese featured in the game-banner. They complained about the unhappy ending, suggesting that the car falls into a lake to justify future increases of the insurance premium:-) To tell the truth, the car falls into a lake, because the banner was part of the integrated campaign that included TV commercials. And in the commercial (made by Instinct BBDO), we see a client of Intouch coming from the lake to pick a replacement car already waiting for him.

The banner even inspired readers of Autokadabra on a couple of spoofs. From time to time, Autokadabra bloggers pick a funny picture and play with it in Photoshop. See on your right how they connected a convertible car waiting for crossing geese with the advergame of Intouch.

See other examples of interactive games, banners and virals created by Novocortex

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