Nokia Pass It On

To promote the Nokia Lumia 1020 phone, Havas Worldwide Helsinki has created the Nokia Pass It On campaign, which sees 30 of the smartphones sent to people in 30 cities around the world. Recipients are then encouraged to take photos with the phones and upload them to the nokia.com/passiton site before handing the phone to someone new and asking them to take their own pics for the project. The aim is to build a set of unique portraits of the cities taken without the interference of the brand or ad agency.

Objective

To drive 120,000 visitors to Nokia’s photography site and engage 40,000 as High Quality Engagements (three minutes on the site viewing at least 3 different types of content) to raise awareness of Nokia’s leadership in mobile photography.

The target audience was people around the world interested in social photography, they know and like Nokia historically but many have been seduced away from the brand by competitors. We sought to underline the phone’s image quality, ease of use and the spontaneous nature of social media, with an activity that would be a natural fit with the way we live today.

Execution

We recruited campaign starters in 30 cities and sent them Lumia 1020 mobile phones. Using a publicly available app, each phone was set up to connect wirelessly to a platform for uploading images. We asked starters to shoot images of their city, as they see it, upload them and then pass the phone on to someone else to do the same, whoever they liked. With no media budget to drive traffic, we identified key photography, travel and marketing blogs and online publications worldwide and seeded the activity with a short film trailer and overview, in the expectation that that they would like the idea and write about it.

Social photography is all about capturing and sharing the moment. The Pass it on campaign was a perfect fit because, like social photography, it was a spontaneous and unpredictable activity. From the day the phones left the starters’ hands no one knew where they would go, what they would capture. Would they all just disappear? This unpredictability caught the attention of media worldwide and they wrote about it, which drove traffic to the site, and participants took part because it was fun. No bought media, a true social activity promoted socially.

Results

Phones were sent to 30 cities worldwide. With customs complications in several countries the activity eventually commenced in 28 cities. 198 participants took part sharing over 2,000 images. There were an average of 7 Pass it on transactions per city. With no media budget to drive traffic we seeded the campaign idea to industry blogs, publications and other social media forums. The final results were three times better than the preset campaign target. Over 400,000 unique visitors to the site over a 4-week period with over 120,000 High Quality Engagements. All this was achieved with no media spending, and as a result, each High Quality Engagement was achieved at 40% of Nokia’s usual HQE cost per contact.