Orange Internet Balloon Race

Orange Business Services, a subsidiary of France Telecom, has come up with a cool (as well as crazy, and a bit convoluted) campaign called “The World’s First Internet Balloon Race.” While this campaign yet again belongs to a company outside of our sheltered US borders, and so deviates slightly from the original purpose of this blog, the amount that this campaign depends upon the online chatter through the blogosphere (which is global in scope, and thus also concerns the US) makes it easily relevant enough for a posting.

Poke, an ad agency in London specializing in interactive, web-based projects, created this Web site and the campaign itself, which is already storming the blogosphere, as intended, though the actual “race” doesn’t begin until June 22nd.

So, to get to the point, Orange has created a new “animal tariffs” system for pay-as-you-go phones and communications devices. For this new concept, they are using animal symbols to represent the different possible pay-as-you-go packages. So…Poke came up with the idea of this internet balloon race as a viral web-based promotion for Orange. Check out these packages below:



The idea is that you go to the home page of the Balloon Race, choose a balloon animal, name it, write a little message, and then you’re off to the race! So, basically, from what I gather, you just try to generate as much buzz as you can around your personal balloon (which, in turn, virally markets this campaign like crazy). As word about your balloon spreads by getting more and more attention online, you gain “internet miles,” which propel you towards victory. The winner of this race gets a 7 day all-expense paid trip to Ibiza for themselves and “a gang of [their] friends,” with a “luxury private villa with a pool, tennis court, personal chef,” et. Al. But to keep the less-than-Lance Armstrong racers interested, they also give out small daily prizes based on a raffle system for people who meet a certain daily quota of online attention.



Perhaps the only downside to this campaign is the lack of content explaining the actual relationship between the animal balloons and animal symbols for pay-as-you-go; there is very little correlation between the balloon race and Orange at all. I had to do a bit of digging to figure out exactly what the relationship was. I think that this could be easily remedied by making the “join Orange for free” section on the Balloon Race site more visible, right now it is a tiny link on the bottom-left-hand side of the page, which is way too peripheral; in my opinion it should have a much more obvious presence on the Web site. It’s important not to lose sight of the fact that ultimately this campaign should directly promote Orange itself, perhaps even resulting in a sale or two. However, overall, this is a very clever campaign that has already crossed the pond (the Atlantic) and is gaining tons of momentum in terms of online WOM, and the race hasn’t even started yet!

Props to Martina over at Adverblog for Spreading the Word about this neat new campaign.