Interview with ‘horizontal scroll game’ designers
For those of you who missed it, check out the maze email below:
{view horizontal email}
Bronto called it, “The coolest email we’ve ever seen“.
Chad White of the Retail Email Blog named it, “One of the most interesting emails I’ve seen all year“.
And eROI called it, “Wild“. You can check out more on how it was made here.
Design Team:
I chased up @Locals_Know on Twitter, hoping to find out how the email performed. BJ Vicks, Community Manager at Radar DDB, kindly forwarded my questions to the design team. Here’s what I’ve been able to find out:
1. Who were the designers and how did they come up with the idea?
Writer: Ryan Leeson and Art Director: Murray Falconer, Creative Directors: Josh Fehr and Cosmo Campbell (of Tribal DDB )
Locals Know launched during the summer of this year and was quite successful. There was a flood of positive press (It was named as one of the top 10 travel campaigns of all time by Forbes) with thousands of crowdsourced entries.
The idea was to re-engage - via email - the 4,000 plus people who contributed to the summer version of the Locals Know campaign. The campaign is all about finding a hidden travel gem. To launch the winter version we thought an email that demonstrated this would be the perfect solution.
The winter campaign just launched and we’ve already received hundreds of entries. You can check out the progress here.
It’s worth noting the scale of the project.
The Locals Know site is the hub for it all, but there are sizable communities on a variety of platforms that are all tied into the main site through the widget on the right side:
Our Locals Know Winter group on Flickr is growing quickly, with over 250 members and hundreds of video submissions. We’re collecting videos on YouTube that feed into our video widget. The Locals Know Twitter account. Equivalents on all fronts are available for our French-speaking residents in Québec at: http://www.secretdici.ca
2. How did the email campaign perform, did most of your subscribers find the hidden link?
The email blast only just went out on last Friday, so it’s too early to tell, but judging by the reaction on blogs like yours it’s certainly gaining a lot of attention.
3. Would you be willing to share some email stats?
We’re a little bit more tight-lipped about such matters with a government client, for obvious reasons.
4. Would it be fair to say that you are pleased with the results from the email campaign without going into stats?
I think it’s safe to say that we’re thrilled with the response to the whole Locals Know program.
The strong response to the summer program has definitely transferred to the winter campaign, and the strength of the program owes a lot to the abundance of passionate explorers within Canada.
I hope this helps illuminate the campaign a bit. The numbers outside of the newsletter speak for themselves.
Without stats, it’s hard to say conclusively how the email campaign performed. Though the comments above suggest that the integrated campaign (print, magazine, TV, email and online) has been a success.