Achtung! enters the Society of Digital Agencies (SoDA), a network of the leading digital agency’s, like B-Reel, Profero and Perfect Fools. The society conducts research, shares knowledge, and exchanges professionals in order to professionalize the digital marketing and communications industry. Achtung! was invited to join SoDA because of its innovative work over the past years for clients like Volkswagen, O’Neill and Vodafone.

We were invited to Digital Dinner at Rainarai, an Aglerian restaurant in Amsterdam. Though the food was wonderful, the portions were a bit meager. And since there was plenty of alcohol, we’re writing this piece a bit hungover. But the good news is that the evening was packed. Achtung!’s Dick Buschman did the introduction, explaining that Emerce initiated the event to connect with the Dutch creative industry. The organization (Achtung!, Bert Hagendoorn, and Pop The Campaign) then asked Creative Social to select some interesting speakers. Marc Chalmers (Perfect Fools), founder of Creative Social explained how members of Creative Social have to introduce theirselves; they have to show what they are working on and finish their presentation with the words “That’s me that is.” So we had the honor to witness the introduction of the 10 new Creative Social members.

Some of the new members showed a case film, which made things paradoxically a little less personal. That’s probably why the person we remember best didn’t need a voice over to introduce himself; James Cooper, Chief Innovation Officer at JWT New York, presented the first ‘bad ass’ ping pong clothing brand, called Thompson Punke. He loves ping pong, but hated the fact that there are no cool ping pong clothing brands. Not very digital, but very funny. Anders Gustafsson, from Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, shared his Chevrolet Sonic campaign which was launched during the Super Bowl with the OK Go clip. In the next stage the Sonic is doing stunts, like bungee jumping, and the online community gets initiate the stunts by Liking them. Achtung! shared its Volkswagen Fanwagen case, a virtual VW Minivan turned into a real life ‘wagen’ – here’s the very smooth animated casefilm. Volkwagen’s briefing was; give us 30.000 Likes. Thanks to the Fanwagen VW is now the no.1 Dutch car brand on Facebook. Another new member, Cris Baylis from Tribal DDB, shared what seemed to us the most techy concept; ‘Obsessed by Sound’. A website for Philips that took Tribal a full year to build and allows you to single out any of the 51 members of the Metropole Orchestra. The other new Creative Social members are Sam de Volder, These Days; Tony Högqvist, Perfect Fools; Liz Sivell, Start JudgeGill; Alessandra Lariu, She Says; Rogier Vijverberg, SuperHeroes; Sam Ball, Lean Mean Fighting Machine. Thanks, Digital Dinner, for inviting us, an inspiring night it was!

Last year we were invited to the Digital Podge, an informal get together of digital minds. Now there’s yet another digital dinner in Amsterdam, held on the 21st of March, literally called ‘Digital Dinner’. It is organized by Emerce, Achtung! (that also initiated the Dutch Podge), Bert Hagendoorn, and our colleagues from Pop The Campaign. What is different from the podge is that there will be some great speakers from here and abroad sharing their work and experiences in digital creativity. The evening, moderated by Dick Buschman (Achtung!), will be enlightened by – among others – Anders Gustafsson (CD at Goodby, Silverstein & Partners), James Cooper (Innovation Officer at JWT), Tony Högqvist (Founder of Perfect Fools), and Sam Ball (Creative Partner at Lean Mean Fighting Machine). The complete list of speakers (partly selected by Creative Social, another organizer of digital get togethers) can be found on a very nicely designed website – see also screenshot above. The bad news is that the evening is for the largest part invite only. The good news is that we’ll share what we learn and, more importantly, that as from Monday there is a small amount of tickets publicly available – €250 a piece. We recommend to put up a tent in front of the website.

Chances are we’re going to have an ‘Elfstedentocht’ (Eleven-town-tour) next weekend; a 200 km ice skating tour through the province of Friesland. What’s unique about the tour is that on average it’s only held once every 7 years. The reason is that the ice needs to be at least 15 cm thick along the entire track to be able to hold an impressive amount of 15.000 contestants passing it during the race. The entire country – or rather all lazy media for whom this topic is an easy catch – are in anticipation of the “tour of tours”. And since hot chocolate is the most popular drink sold on the ice for (recreational) ice skaters, Chocomel is working overtime. And naturally its agency Achtung! jumped on the ‘Elfstedenkoorts’ (Eleven-town-fever) with the Elfstedenbarometer app that shows the percentage of chance there will be an Elfstedentocht. The app displays the weather forcesast and, more importantly, the percentage of chance of the tour taking place (this morning 49% – which is not much compared to the amount of press coverage). It’s not the most innovative app ever, but if you’re fed up with all the media religiously and constantly talking about the Elfstedentocht, this is the app for the bare facts. And apparently it’s a winner, cause it’s the fourth most downloaded app in the Netherlands at the moment. Oh, and not to forget, when you tweet about it, you can win a winter supply of Chocomel.

Recently Achtung! created quite an unusual campaign to communicate Vodafone’s fiber internet; in the small town of Roggel (Limburg) a real race track was laid out around the center, where celebrity Jenson Button raced his Formula 1 car against the locals – who were racing in a simulator. The entire town was involved and a documentary was made of the event. The event was to bring Vodafone and its proposition (high speed internet) as close as possible to the user. To learn more about the story behind this campaign we asked Dick Buschman, MD and Head of Strategy of Achtung!, a few questions.

What did the initial Vodafone briefing say?
Village-by-village rollout of fiber internet throughout the Netherlands is mainly dictated by small local players. For a big international brand as Vodafone it is not easy to enter this market. The question was: how do we get close to our new potential clients? As an international brand, Vodafone is used to think big and push the message, but for this product they could not get away with that. So our mission was to get close to the local community, activate them, and win their sympathy.

How was the race set up?
We chose Roggel, because it is one of the smaller towns in the Netherlands with only 4000 inhabitants. To get them involved we gave all of them a chance to race against Button. We made a selection by asking local clubs (football, orchestra, etc.) to organize speed contests. 10 of them did. Out of the 10 winners, 3 eventually went through to the Formula 1 simulator. The simulator, racing against Button’s physical car, showed an exact 3D copy of the streets.

Logistically it sounds like a bit of a nightmare
It proved difficult, yes, but we also had a lot of fun. A smart move was involving the mayor, who organized ‘hearings’ and actively asked the inhabitants’ participation – I think he saw it as a good PR opportunity for his town. But, yes, it did require a huge team to pull it all off. We started with concepting 6 weeks prior to the race. As the idea involved the participation of the local community, a dedicated team of 6 people worked from Roggel. But the total team was much bigger. A team of Vodafone did the overall planning and coordination. 328 Stories lived in Roggel for almost 5 weeks to make the documentary. Then there was DNA Events, who prepared the actual race, with all the logistics. And, finally, a team of RTL was involved. The total crew was over 60 people.

This is the documentary directed by Andreas Pasvantis (328 Stories)

O.k., so you got Roggel involved. How about the rest of the Netherlands?
We published small teasing videos of the local preparing activities on the dedicated website (www.grandprixvanroggel.nl) and Facebook page. Apart from that we were able to make a deal with sports channel RTL 7, who broadcasted the race live on national television. Two weeks later the documentary was released online and, again, on TV.

How did the locals react to this brand circus?
The preparations, to select the 3 local heroes, and the physical Grand Prix really connected the town – and I don’t mean that in Vodafone’s language. What I mean is that the entire town was truly involved and excited about the race; we still receive letters and pictures that show true enthusiasm. That’s how Vodafone instantly became a local friend. And that’s not easy in a small a town, especially when you’re a global brand like Vodafone. But it worked. Vodafone has won a serious market position in Roggel.

I can imagine that. How were the results nationally?
Well, as said, we reached the rest of the Netherlands through online and TV. Both the Grand Prix and documentary reached 2.4 million people on national television. The videos and trailers posted on our website and Facebook before, during and after the event spread through weblogs and reached over 250.000 unique viewers. And the footage that was spread clearly communicates Vodafone’s local touch.

Which town is next to be put upside down?
I am not sure whether this will get a sequel. But we just released a new app for Vodafone, called Appstein; it searches for the Einstein of apps. The campaign targets prepaid callers and tests their knowledge about smartphone apps – normally they do not use apps a lot, since most prepaid phones are not exactly ‘smart’.

Brands that beg for Likes – without presenting any Likeable content – don’t really understand how social media work. We usually don’t ‘Like’ these brands, because they just want to spam your Wall. But when every Like begged very smartly represents a condom to support an educational project set up by Stop Aids Now! in Kibagare, Nairobi (Kenia), you can easily earn our sympathy. Even if the content (in Dutch) is not necessarily very likeable; Nicolette Kluijver – who presents a TV program about sex and drugs – asks for your condom (read: Like) in a few different short films. Apparently we’re not the only ones that find this campaign sympathetic, cause the target of 20.000 condoms was met in merely 2 days. The target has now been raised to 40.000. Created by Achtung!