Jersey Sucks

“Viral marketing” or “word of mouse” is a term used to describe any promotional technique which seeks to circumvent traditional marketing channels and persuade the public to do the marketing on your behalf. A good example of this in practice is an email joke. Most people who receive a joke they find amusing will normally forward this on to their friends who will in turn forward it on to theirs. The speed and ease of use of email means that this joke can be brought to the attention of millions of users within a few hours all for a minimal cost.

Linesnapper sought to create a practical demonstration of this concept which would highlight the possibilities afforded by viral marketing to Channel Island businesses. One obvious talking point within the islands is the eternal rivalry between Guernsey “donkeys” and Jersey “Crapauds” and the agency sought to create a campaign which would utilise this mild mannered competition.

First the domains JerseySucks.com and GuernseySucks.com were registered and similar but regionally altered Macromedia Flash games created for both domains. The aim of the games was to defend either Castle Cornet or Gorey Castle from invasion from the opposing island. All scores were added together for each island and stored in a Microsoft SQL Server 2000 system. A facility was also added for players to email their friends the address of the site.

The agency decided the keep the advertising of the site to a minimum to measure the effectiveness of such a limited approach. Thirty emails were sent out to friends and two hundred leaflets simply bearing the site address were posted in both islands.

From such a small scale level of promotion the results have been quite dramatic. Within four days the number of combined unique hits had exceeded 9,000 visitors and to date this number has reached well over 15,000. Visitors to the Linesnapper.com site quadrupled throughout these four days and over nine hundred emails were sent using the site’s “tell a friend” facility. This experiment has proved such a success that clients are already asking for similar promotional games to advertise their products.