To get Best Buy associated with some of the season’s hottest tech gifts, DDB Canada is mixing new media with old parlour games.
Best Buy invites Canadians to unwrap a virtual present on the electronics retailer’s Facebook page for a chance to win one its “13 Favourite Things”–a list of tech gadgets that includes a Nike GPS watch, a Samsung tablet and a Kobo e-reader. One participant will win all 13 items, a prize valued at an estimated $3,500.
If they don’t win, players are invited to pass the virtual present to their Facebook friends. If one of those people wins a prize, the person who forwarded the present also receives a $25 Best Buy gift card.
Josh Fehr, creative director at DDB Canada’s Vancouver office, said the objective is to get Best Buy on shoppers’ radar as the place to find this season’s most coveted gift items. “The challenge was, how do we not just get the product on people’s radar as a gift idea, but ensure that they associate that gift with Best Buy,” he said.
The program is aimed primarily at moms, said Fehr, since they are often the people “in charge” of the holidays. While men tend to covet tech gifts, women are often charged with finding the perfect gift. “They’re the ones that are making the decisions, the ones that are trying to find the stocking stuffers for their kids and trying to surprise the men in their life with a killer gift,” he says.
The program launched Friday, and had generated almost 16,000 “unwraps” as of Thursday morning. Internal tracking indicates that the two biggest user groups for Pass the Present are women 25-34 and women 35-44.
“[Facebook] is an awesome channel if you’ve got the right trigger,” said Fehr. “The hope is always that what you plant grows exponentially. That’s a power that’s in social media, and Facebook is such a core component of that.”
Facebook ads and outreach to mommy bloggers are also being used to generate awareness of the initiative, which runs through Dec. 22.
