Overview

Over the previous 6 years we have produced a variety of online solutions for The Times. In September 2008, we were commissioned to build a James Bond themed microsite entitled 'Be a Bond Baddie'.

Brief

As part of their online James Bond feature - and to coincide with the release of the latest Bond movie - The Times (in association with American Express) required a microsite that promoted the theme of James Bond in a light-hearted and engaging manner.

The following objectives were identified:

• Promote The Times coverage of James Bond on their website

• Give added value PR to The Times

• Raise awareness of American Express to The Times readership

• Generate large amounts of traffic and repeat visits

Approach

Our concept for this project revolved around developing a highly interactive application that had a strong viral element to it. In order for this to be successful, we felt that the use of humour was important in engaging with the user, ensuring that it was 'passed on' and generating repeat visits.

We decided to integrate the microsite into a social networking platform in order to reinforce the viral aspect of the application.

Solution

The Flash-based microsite allowed users to upload a thumbnail portrait of themselves or their friends and accessorise it, dress it up and apply a voice recording to it. This in turn generated a talking James Bond villain type of character. Functionality was provided for users to alter the scale, rotation, colour and contrast of their images and accessories to create highly personalised characters.

Friends were then notified via an email which directed them to the microsite to view the character and create their own.

Users were able to add their characters to their Facebook profiles and also create characters from within the Facebook platform itself. This information was published to users' news feeds, alerting all their friends to the application. A Facebook group was also created in order for users to interact with each other more directly.

Results

The Times and American Express were thrilled with what we produced and both the microsite and Facebook applications were highly successful in terms of traffic and uptake of the application. Over 5,000 characters were generated and passed on by users in the three month period that the site was live.