"Not only amusing, with its comical and clever approach to promoting the brand, this site has solid user interaction and a worthy payoff." —juror Edward J. Heinz Jr.
"Taps into a deep-seated, human need to be more desirable to the opposite sex, using the latest social networking tools and a good dose of humor." —juror Amber Bezahler
Overview: This application transforms the Old Spice Swagger campaign into an online experience while increasing awareness of the new scent. Aimed at men aged 12 to 34, with a creative bull's-eye of men aged 18 to 24, Swaggerizeme.com allows users to enhance their "swagger" by creating fake, flattering articles, blogs and Web sites about themselves that come up when anyone does a Web search on their name. The central interactive feature is a set of sliders that allows users to choose qualities (Goodlookingness, Strongliness, Geniusmanship) that are then filtered through a Mad Lib-style copy generator to create unique articles to post to a network of twelve fake blogs.
• The site, blog network, and AdWords were constructed using a mix of ActionScript 3, PHP, open-source API integration and custom Wordpress builds.
• With over 500,000 visitors since launch, the campaign helped increase sales by over 20 percent.
• Thirteen video clips displayed at random intervals depending on a user's position within the site.
Comments by Jason Bagley:
Where did this idea come from? "We felt that the Internet didn't have enough fabricated misinformation on it, and we wanted to do something about it. Too many potential employers, fiancés and FBI agents were searching people's names online and discovering actual 'factual' facts. Not cool. Our solution: Swaggerizeme.com
What was the most challenging aspect of the project? "The primary challenge was how to create a network of content large enough to impact Google search rankings, yet diverse enough to avoid being filtered out as spam by the search engine robot. This was overcome through a calculated system of content creation that ensured proper keyword density, meta-tag descriptions and diversity of content throughout the network.
"In order to fool the search engines, no two fake articles that swaggerizeme.com generates could be exactly the same. In order to accomplish this we had to make the articles Mad Lib-style; each article was made-up of dozens of sentences and half sentences selected at random by the application. We didn't see the application run for the first time until the day before the launch. And the articles read like gibberish. Every account, media, planner and creative person in the department had to cancel all their meetings for the day to help rewrite all the fake articles in order to make the launch."
