Weetbix serves over a million penalties to Lucas Radebe

It’s no easy feat to take penalties against an international soccer star, no less over a million of them. But that’s exactly what Weetbix did when Stimulli approached 7Dffrnt Knds of Smke to bring an interactive experience to their campaign involving Lucas Radebe.

It’s one thing to have your sports hero smiling at you from giant billboards, but a whole other ball game to play against him in the sport that you love. 7DKS knew that sports fans want to get closer to their heroes… and what better way to do that than to have them play the sport against them using their mobile phones.

In fact, fans were so keen on the idea that using the Weetbix.mobi site, players shot more than 1,100,000 penalties at the soccer star. Ryan Gandalf van Jaarsveld, MD of 7Dffrnt Knds of Smke explains, “We knew we would have another opportunity to bring the consumer closer to their sporting hero than ever before. Without this interactive element Lucas would have just featured on the Weetbix TV commercial, print media and other traditional channels.”

The mobisite was created to be a game, whereby users would register on Weetbix.mobi and get a certain amount of attempts to take penalty shots at Lucas Radebe. With the use of professional camera crews and specialist equipment, the outcome videos were shot to give the player the feeling that they themselves were taking those penalty shots. The player took the shots at Lucas Radebe himself, in person, as opposed to playing with computer-generated avatar.
Van Jaarsveld continues, “We wanted to make the experience more personal for the consumer. This is the second time in South Africa mobile has been used to provide a real life video game experience to the end user. Instead of the consumer playing against an animated version of their sports idol they are playing against the real life version. By carefully selecting their shot the consumer would try and outsmart Lucas and score as many goals as possible.” Players would be scored accordingly and there was a leaderboard for daily, weekly and overall high-scorers.

The impact was staggering. 1,146,936 penalties were taken against Lucas, and the top player of the game took a whopping 94,710 penalties.

So who played? This surprised everyone: some were in their twenties, but many were middle-aged and older, with someone as old as 75 in the top 35 players of the game. A third of people playing the game played by referral, and on average two people per household were playing. This meant that households were purchasing as extra box of Weetbix each just so they could play the game.

Total clicks from CPC Media: 53, 356
Total visits: 232, 407
Total Page Views: 1, 817, 626
Average time spent: 00:02:57
Viral reach: 432%
Added value: R400, 571