brand&deliver London

ABOUT

Background & Objectives:

LG uses a bespoke platform, called LG Lounge, in order to educate staff at third party retailers about its products. These staff can take a variety of education modules to learn about products, with incentives encouraging them to do so. The ultimate goal is to arm sales staff with the knowledge to make selling LG products as easy as possible.

We designed and launched LG Lounge and have managed it, and all related activations, since its creation.

Since it was first launched LG Lounge has had high sign ups but LG wanted to increase engagement and dwell time on the site to maximise its potential during the key summer period.

The previous year LG approached this challenge with a large sales-led promotion (ran by us), awarding cash prizes when its products were sold. While successful, LG felt this method was expensive and didn’t rely on staff using LG Lounge to learn.

This year LG asked us for a plan that fundamentally required staff to engage with the resources on LG Lounge, without relying on cash-rewards to incentivise staff.

LG was also eager for us to leverage its recent partnership with The Football Association (The FA).

With the 2018 FIFA World Cup Russia fast approaching, we saw an opportunity and created the Playoff Predictor; an all-encompassing World Cup prediction game. We built engagement into the system by requiring participants to complete LG education modules to unlock the ability to predict each stage of the tournament.

The LG Lounge has always enjoyed a strong level of sign-ups from staff at third party retailers selling its products. However, a much bigger (and constant) challenge has been keeping the level of engagement high.

LG’s fundamental objective was to increase engagement on the website. It set us three interconnected goals which were all measured against the previous summer promotion in 2017:

1. Increase the number of education modules taken from 46.5k to 55k. (An 8.5k increase.)
2. Increased average page views per session from 10.92 to 12 pages. (A 1.08 page increase.)
3. Increase average dwell time on the site from 6mins 2secs to 6mins 20secs. (An 18 second increase.)

Lastly it set us a target of getting at least 25% percent of eligible third-party staff to engage with the content.

These targets were all chosen to help LG Lounge meet its core function of engaging and educating third-party staff so they can more effectively sell LG products.


Execution:

LG originally suggested leveraging its FA partnership by having us host and run a huge country-wide football tournament for its third-party retailers, an LG World Cup to run alongside the real thing. However, we realised this wasn’t connected enough to LG Lounge’s core function of educating people about their products. The physical matches would always be the focus over LG Lounges role in the tournament. Additionally, we saw an issue around a football tournament not being particularly inclusive. It skewed participation towards younger, male staff.

Instead we suggested a game based around predicting the results of the World Cup. We knew this had advantages for several reasons. Firstly, with the popularity of World Cup sweepstakes and the tournament’s ability to transcend past dedicated football fans, we knew we’d reach a much broader section of eligible staff as the game’s structure would be simple to communicate. Plus, everyone likes to guess and speculate on the World Cup!

Secondly, we would be able to run the Playoff Predictor from within LG Lounge itself, giving us total control of the User Experience and allowing us to intrinsically link the campaign with Lounge’s educational goal.

The Playoff Predictor worked as follows. Staff would pick their teams for each stage of the World Cup. Crucially, in order to unlock each stage, they would have to complete specific LG training modules. We designed the content and layout of the site to funnel users towards the next education module and created a ‘badge’ system, to award icons for each completed test, gamifying the process.

Correct picks would earn them points, which can be used to ‘buy’ entries into the Grand Prize. The prize was a LG product package worth over £3k including the latest state-of-the-art OLED TV, a speaker system and LG’s flagship mobile phone.

In addition to the Grand Prize we also had a Launch Prize (a trip to Russia to watch England play!) which every participant was entered in. There were also opportunities to enter spot prize draws throughout the competition, with winners picked at random. Some of the spot prizes included were Wembley tours, product bundles, England memorabilia and tickets to England games at Wembley.

In order to build anticipation before the start of the competition we sent promotional comms to all store managers, which included the details of the Playoff Predictor, the prizes available and how to win them! It was all topped off with a 30 second teaser film. LG Reps were also briefed and sent to stores in order to drive awareness and interest.

In addition, we sent do-it-yourself Foosball tables made of (robust) cardboard to key locations and World Cup tracker charts to all stores to help foster bragging rights and act as a physical reminder of the Playoff Predictor.

We also redesigned the education modules themselves to give them a World Cup flavour. For example, modules were named after footballing terms, such as Accuracy, Teamwork and Atmosphere. It meant that at every stage of the LG Lounge user experience was reinforcing the Playoff Predictor.

Every element of the content we created, from the layout of the site to the education modules on it, and from the regular prizes to the in-store comms were all designed to constantly push users back to LG Lounge and meaningfully engage with the platform.

Results:
The results show our creative thinking was on the mark. We beat every single target set for us by LG.

1. We increased the number of education modules taken to 61k. An increase of 14.5k YoY, beating our 8.5K target by 6k.
2. We increased average page views to 13.59 session. An increase of 2.67 pages YoY, beating our 1.08 target by 1.59 pages.
3. We increased dwell time to 6mins 25secs. An increase of 23 seconds YoY, beating our 18 second target by 5 seconds.

30.5% of eligible users took part, comfortably beating our 25% target.

8,954 match predictions were made during the competition, with 913 people making predictions for every single game.

No one correctly predicted every single game.

LG was thrilled with the activation. By a clever and strategic use of content we exceeded its previous year’s results while dramatically slashing its budget.

Lastly, there were 1,966 entries for spot prizes during the competition. It looks like 1966 is a magic number for English football fans after all…!

Who pooled - The LG Playoff Predictor