Mister Potato's Football Contest aka Project Trafford

I’m going to begin this entry with how Project Trafford came about.

You see, Nuffnang has in the past run many many many campaigns for all our different clients and this is how it typically works.

Some people from the client, the advertising agency and Nuffnang will sit together in a room to brainstorm to come up with an idea.

These brainstorm sessions can last from a few hours to even the entire day. I had one brainstorming session that lasted from morning throughout the late afternoon and lunch was just some McDs Delivery that we ordered.

One day I was at a marketing seminar and the speaker there was talking about the phase of Web 2.0. Now what Web 2.0 essentially means is instead of content being generated by the content providers, it is not generated by users. Blogs, Facebook, YouTube thrive on mostly user-generated content and fall into this category.

Then there was the case study we were shown where in the USA, the most expensive TV spot in the world ie the 30 second commercial for the Superbowl was given to the public to create their own ad and air it.

Of the many many people who created their own homemade ads for the brand, one of them got selected and this is what that person came up with for something like USD12.
That’s right… no camera crew, no professional actors, no nothing. Just a video camera and a home computer.




I got inspired by this one case study. So I went to one of our clients and said
“Hey… why not.. instead of us pretending to understand what bloggers and blog readers wanna read, why don’t we help put them in groups to work together to come up with something”.

It was something we had never done before, and in all fairness it could work or not work… but fortunately the people at Mister Potato were open to trying it out.

What we did was put 40 bloggers in 8 groups, each with a group leader.

My group had two group leaders because well.. I had to have a backup in case I was sent overseas for work or something during the week we were supposed to get something done.The Mission: The use our blogs as a medium to promote the upcoming Mister Potato Football Contest where 30 people will stand a chance to win a trip to Old Trafford to watch Manchester United play.

All you have to do is collect points from all the Mister Potato packs you buy to munch and even if you didn’t get to win the trip to Old Trafford, you could still stand a chance to win monthly prizes of some football jerseys.

My group members were if anything proactive to the max!!!

They were excited about the idea and one of them even took the liberty to put together a Google Group for us to share our ideas online (since well.. many of us aren’t geographically near each other).
The first thing we explored was… what each person was good at doing and here’s what we found.

One of my group members, Cedric was good in photoshop.Another Hwei Ming was good at photography.

Another Sidney, was good at BAKING.

Another Joe, was very into the local celebrity scene.

So we thought… hey why not have Sidney bake some little sugar dolls of each of us, have Hwei Ming take pictures of them in different angles and then have Cedric photoshop all of them into a comic strip.

And to add a bit more spice to the comic strip, let Joe bring in a local celebrity into the comic strip.

The rest of us along with Joshua and Jason worked on the ideas for the storyline.

The result… well.. you guys be the judges.
And yes… that IS Hannah Tan… :P

We have Joe to thank for that.

If you guys wanna win a trip to Old Trafford, click here.
*And yes… my group is probably the only one of 8 groups with ALL GUYS IN IT. Ishh.. Robb!!!