Our Work
Ad Battle
Background
Ad Battle began as a pet project – something that Jason Cuthbertson, Senior Art Director at Atmosphere BBDO, worked on in his spare time. In its original incarnation, Ad Battle was a website that allowed users to upload and subsequently vote for their favorite print ads of all time. Mike Lazerow, CEO at Buddy Media, saw tremendous potential for a social media application built on the Ad Battle model. Luckily, Buddy Media had worked with Cuthbertson in the past on several successful marketing initiatives, so an amicable partnership was formed to bring Ad Battle to Facebook. Both Lazerow and Cuthbertson envisioned the Ad Battle Facebook application as a tool for gleaning valuable knowledge about consumers based on their reactions to advertising. In addition, Lazerow believed that Ad Battle would initiate a conversation between Buddy Media and the advertising world at large, while communicating our expertise in planning, building, and promoting social media applications.
Objectives
- Build an engaging social application that would communicate Buddy Media’s expertise in planning, strategizing, developing, and promoting social media app-vertisements
- Convert the Ad Battle website into a Facebook application while increasing functionality to include social actions, video embedding, and an advertising quiz
- Leverage insights gleaned from user behavior to determine what types of advertising messaging consumers connect with.
Solution
Buddy Media rebuilt the Ad Battle website from scratch, converting the open web HTML coding into Facebook-friendly PHP. The basic functionality remained the same — two opposing ads are pitted against one another in a randomly sequenced order that ensures that no single ad is seen more or less often than the next. Buddy Media added video embedding functionality to the application, so that users could vote on both television and print advertisements. Users were encouraged to upload their favorite ads in order to increase the library of content that launched with the application. The addition of a benchmarking feature let users build their Ad Battle ranking from Featherweight to Heavyweight — depending upon the performance of their uploaded ads. An additional social functionality allowed users to compare their Ad Battle rankings with others within their network of social contacts. The application also featured a Mystery Ad Game that tested advertising IQ by way of a quiz that required users to match brand names with advertising slogans or famous print ads. Once again, a social feature let users compare their Mystery Ad Game scores to those of their friends.
In the past, consumers had relied on advertisers to tell them what to buy. With the social media revolution sweeping across the globe, it became evident that people wanted to voice their opinions about the way their favorite brands market products. Essentially, that’s what Buddy Media’s Brand Advocate Process is all about – gleaning consumer intelligence to build a loyal audience of ‘fans.’ The Ad Battle application gave consumers a way to communicate their likes and dislikes about advertising campaigns, steering brands down a new road — a road where the consumer is not beset by advertising, but instead engaged with it. In the future, the insights gleaned from the preferences of social network users will allow advertisers to see what types of messaging resonates with consumers, and subsequently leverage that intelligence to create more effective ad campaigns.
