Insight
For the last 20 years, our youth have become more sedentary than ever; they spend up to seven hours a day in front of a screen and Colombia is in the top five Latin-American countries where the physical inactivity is considered one of the main causes of deaths.
Pony Malta, one of the most popular soft drinks in Colombia, is concerned about this problem. For 60 years it has been sponsoring sports being recognised as a symbol of physical activity, but many efforts to encourage kids to move didn't click due to sedentarism.
And young sedentarism is directly related with spending time in the virtual world, which is fun, without boundaries and brings social recognition. Having this is mind, the challenge was to inspire youth to prefer the real world where you have to move your body, sweat your shirt and leave that homey couch, than keep living in the comfort of a virtual world.
Strategy
Pony Malta decided to use digital to get them out of digital.
By leveraging gamification principles (achievements and badges, behavioural momentum, challenge discovery, lottery, points, level progression, quests, reward schedules, status, auction houses and community collaboration) occurring in youth virtual experiences, the brand managed to engage them in an alternate reality game without precedent in our market. It turned their life into a game, their cameras into their primary weapons, their friends into their allies and the rest of the community into their targets. The brand created zonapony.com, a game, where kids compete and collaborate with proof of physical movement.
Execution
But not like Super Mario Brothers or Call of Duty. Here, it’s physical effort that allows them to remain active in the game. With the use of social media, rich media, targeted media and for the first time the product to ignite the experience, to drive traffic to zonapony.com.
Here, the players found unusual missions created by other players such as “Surf on your mattress”, “Bite your elbow”, “Become a giant” or “Walk on water”. In each one they had to upload their photos proving they accomplished each mission. The community decided which had more energy; which was the best one.
Every time a set of challenges was completed, more difficult challenges appeared with even better rewards. As the game advanced, the players received more points and credits that they could use in the auction house where they could purchase or bet on amazing sporting goods.
In the first three months the brand started to see how users preferred to use their muscles and nailed it at breakdance, they became skaters, ninjas, soccer players; they flew, shared their superpowers, and the best of all, they took over the brand.
Results
The platform was launched with 99 challenges and in the first few months the community created more than 2,000 different physical challenges.
Players completed 54,000 missions, 180% more than the content generated by users in campaigns such as Domino’s “Show us your pizza” or Red Bull Illume’s “Image quest”, in a country that is eight times smaller than the US. Over 80% of registered users left their homes to complete missions, contributing to a Facebook fan base increase of 60% and establishing a community of 300,000 people gathered around their passion for movement and sport. They spent an average of five minutes online, but most importantly, if you add all the hours they spent accomplishing these missions, the result would be more than 562 days of physical movement.
In the end, Pony Malta managed to engage millennials into preferring physical activities, while inspiring people from all around Colombia and changing their sedentary habits and its growing trend. They also began to compete in missions and went from clicking to moving.