Case study: How M&C made a stink

Comic Relief has come a long way since it launched back in 1985, raising over £750m in the process, primarily through its Red Nose Day events. But this year it wanted to appeal in particular to men between the ages of 18 to 35, a demographic group that traditionally has not engaged and donated to the charity.
And what better way than to develop custom-made app, all about passing wind? Specially created by TheGivingLab, the “Britain’s Biggest Fart for Red Nose Day” app could be downloaded free for the iPhone or Android smartphone.
And M&C Saatchi Mobile donated its time and resources free-of-charge to develop both the mobile creative strategy and mobile media purchasing plan to drive awareness and downloads of the fart app to its target demographic audience.
The agency worked with leading mobile advertising networks and publishers, including Mojiva, Greystripe, Surikate, Inmobi, AppGratis, Haymarket, The Guardian and IPC Media, who each donated over £55,000 of both standard and rich media mobile inventory to promote the app.
It then launched a major promotion campaign which ran for the 29 days leading up to Red Nose Day on Friday March 15. The campaign used expandable rich mobile media banners to drive participants to the landing page of a mobile website, where they answered a series of questions to determine what kind of “farter” they are.
Participants were then prompted to download the free app. Those who did so could then use Facebook notifications to encourage their friends to donate £1 to Comic Relief by using a unique SMS shortcode. For each donation they earned, the user received an audio fart. App users who secured the largest number of donations – and so the largest number of farts – earned a place on the nationwide Red Nose Day “Fart Rank” and could compete to be the biggest fart – both in their local area and also in Britain.
But the results show the campaign was far from a stinker. M&C Saatchi’s creative concept and its tactical mobile media purchasing campaign resulted in consumers downloading the app more than 100,000 times. The app spent nine days in the Top Ten of the “Entertainment” category on the UK Apple App Store, including three days at No 1.
Importantly, it achieved one of the campaign’s original aims – to engage the difficult target demographic of young men aged between 18 and 35 that had been previously hard-to-reach for Comic Relief. Some 53% of app activations came from men, of whom 60% were aged 30 or younger.
The app also succeeded in engaging consumers who had not previously donated to Comic Relief: 46% of players who used the app were first-time fundraisers. The results of the campaign showed the value of “gamification” as a strategy for engaging audiences.
In other stand-out results, women players took each of the top three positions in the nationwide Comic Relief “Fart rank”. Friends of players donated more money than family members, and half of all players donated to their own fundraising total. “My local fart rank” was the app’s most popular feature among users. Britain’s top “farter” collected 115 farts in total from donors.
The app was so successful that Comic Relief is taking the findings from the app and currently exploring possible opportunities to develop it further.
Commenting on the success of the campaign, TheGivingLab chief executive Dominic Vallely said, “We exist to bring together great new ideas, innovative charities and smart partners to create and test new ideas that benefit UK charities. M&C Saatchi Mobile, with its creative smarts, immersion in mobile, and bloody good fun and passionate delivery team, were the most awesome partners one could wish for.”
Meanwhile, M&C Saatchi Mobile global chief executive James Hilton (pictured) added: “It is through the generosity and hard work of the advertising networks who kindly donated inventory that we were able succeed in driving the Britain’s Biggest Fart for Red Nose Day app to the top of the charts in the UK.
“M&C Saatchi Mobile is very proud to have created a No1 app, which raised an impressive amount of money for an amazing cause like Red Nose Day.”