On Monday, 28 March 2011, swiftcover.com launched its new six-figure social media campaign called ‘Roadology’, which aims to make everyday car journeys more exciting.

To mark its arrival, swiftcover.com is offering an all expenses paid, once in a life-time road trip for two along Route 66 for a lucky Absolute Radio listener who will bring the journey to life through the Roadology Facebook Blog. Content will also be supplied by Visit England, Spotify and kgb deals alongside many other hand-picked activities.

Using Facebook as the campaign hub and complemented with Google API map functionality, Twitter and specifically selected blogs, the Roadology Map is about enhancing road trips for UK motorists by suggesting exciting activities and interesting things to see whilst driving. On inputting a start and end point, the function will develop a route before plotting appropriate hidden gems and places of interest, tailored to individuals’ preferences.

Developed by swiftcover.com’s PR agency, Brazil, and its digital agency Steak, the insurer hopes to make journeys more interesting and fun for families, couples or individuals looking for new and different things to do and see along their potentially mundane journey.

Tina Shortle, marketing director at swiftcover.com commented: “We’re always looking to innovate and develop our offering not only for existing customers but for the wider motoring community. The Roadology campaign is extremely exciting for us and is further evidence of us pushing boundaries where we can by giving something useful back to disillusioned commuters who are looking for interesting things to do on boring car journeys.”

swiftcover.com’s PR agency, Brazil, and its digital agency Steak created Roadology and will manage the content and future development of the campaign. Both parties have set up a number of partnerships which will offer a wide range of content and functionality to further enhance the page over the coming months. 

Richard Watts, creative director at PR agency, Brazil commented: “We’ve been working with swiftcover.com for a number of years and it continues to be an exciting and innovative company. Third party relationships will enhance this offering making it a truly unique and engaging place to visit.”

Absolute Radio has partnered with the Roadology campaign to bring the Route 66 competition prize to life, driving traffic and entrants through the Facebook page. The lucky winner of this once in a life-time prize will generate content while on the trip by visiting exciting places along the route – reporting back regularly through the Roadology blog tab.

Kate Bath, head of digital display, at digital agency Steak, commented: “We have evolved swiftcover.com’s social strategy into a focused campaign that combines their core product with their target audience’s key passion points – that being travelling, journeys, music and recommendations. We believe this is a hub where consumers can go to experience new and exciting activities on the road. Coupled with this, is some great innovation in terms of technical builds and partner integration which has provided us with a solid platform on which to launch Roadology.”

swiftcover.com and Spotify have developed a bespoke Roadology Playlist  generator so that motorists can listen to their favourite songs and discover new tracks whilst they travel. Visitors to the Facebook page can enter an artist’s name to create a Spotify playlist of similar music that will last the expected time of the journey. Users with Spotify Premium can listen to the playlist through the Spotify app as they travel. Swiftcover.com is also giving ten lucky winners Spotify Premium accounts.

Regular competitions will also take shape on the page with £2,000 up for grabs in the first four weeks. Entrants need to simply upload their favourite picture of a special place in Great Britain to the competition page to stand a chance of winning.

Visit the Facebook page at www.facebook.com/roadology

There were also great contributions from other speakers from a good cross section of the industry, and the turnout was fantastic, so thanks go out to everyone involved.

You can download a copy of the new IAB Video Handbook, which contains a case study from us, here. And if you want any information about our experience of online video, do get in touch.

The ‘Summer’s Hottest Playlist’ campaign harnessed the passion of Swiftcover’s music-loving audience and sought to engage with its fans through a fun online campaign.

Car insurance isn’t something that usually sparks much excitement but with Swiftcover we tapped into the music festival spirit with a Facebook app and interactive challenge to social media fans to devise the “Summer’s Hottest Playlist”. The campaign worked in collaboration with top Absolute Radio DJs and Spotify.  Facebook fans increased by 280% in a two-week period, and 22,000 people voted for the playlist.

We were also very pleased to receive recognition of our work with Virgin Holidays’ January Sale in SEO, where we beat our sales target by 168%!
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So it’s smiles all round.

John Barton, Head of Social Media and Lynsey Galashan, Senior Accout Executive, receiving the award for ‘Best Digital Strategy’ on Friday night.

The gallery of sad faces will feature on the swiftcover.com Facebook page, updated in real-time, and can be linked to users’ own Facebook pages.  The winner of the best “mourning” face will be announced w/c 11 October, judged by swiftcover.com and will win a Red Letter DayTM experience day voucher worth £300; further prizes include 20 Spotify premium accounts worth £2,400.

The interactive campaign including display advertising, social media activity and advertising in casual games; was devised and conceived by swiftcover.com’s digital agency Steak.  Steak also designed and developed the “Summer Mourning” Facebook application. 

Visitors to the swiftcover.com Facebook page can download a best of the summer festivals top 25 tracks, voted by music fans, from a playlist devised by swiftcover.com, Absolute Radio and Steak.  The list is available for free download via Spotify from 27th September.

Tina Shortle, Marketing Director of Swiftcover says, “We’re excited that social media remains at the heart of this campaign. Last spring, our ‘favourite tracks of the summer’ playlist successfully encouraged sharing between Facebook users, and with the success of this year’s summer festivals; the Summer Mourning campaign and its best of festivals playlist is a fun way of engaging with our audience around the popular subject of the end of the British summer through posting up sad faces. We’ve been delighted to partner with Absolute Radio and Spotify to create Britain’s favourite festival music playlist and it’s been great to see Facebook users take part to vote for their favourite tracks.”
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John Barton, Head of Planning and Social Media at Steak says ” Music and summer festivals are effective passion points for the swiftcover.com demographic and form the basis of our content strategy and Spotify playlist voting campaign. Swiftcover.com is utilising social channels to interact with their audience in an accessible way. People love to share their photographs and then ‘upload a photo to enter’ format is effective for community building. However this format is nothing new. We wanted to close the summer strategy in a different, fun and memorable way by poking fun at the winter blues after an amazing summer of music festivals with swiftcover.com and Absolute radio.”

Kate Hussey, Head of Display at Steak says “We are once again excited about extending the field of our current social activity to further develop a relationship between consumer and client. We believe that integration between all digital and other advertising channels is crucial to gain stand out, but essentially, it’s finding a connection with your consumers that will gain, the all important, traction. We are delighted to partner with a client who is constantly pushing the boundaries of building consumer relationships through digital”.

Hooray! We’ve been shortlisted for the 2010 DADI Awards!

Our work for Virgin Holidays is up for ‘Best Use of Organic Search’ and our “Summer’s Hottest Playlist” campaign is in the running for the ‘Digital Media Strategy’ award.

Looking forward to November when we find out if we win…

The in-game ads will tie into Swiftcover’s “Get a Life” advertising campaign theme featuring Iggy Pop and the “Little Iggy” puppet.

Tina Shortle, Marketing Director for AXA Insurance and swiftcover.com, commented on the initiative, “Swiftcover and Steak have worked closely together over the past five years to stay ahead of the competition. We were the first online only car insurer in 2005, we launched the first car insurance mobile site back in 2007 and have pioneered emerging media channels including Video on Demand and Spotify. Most importantly, we’ve capitalised on early-adopter advantage and have seen some fantastic results.”

The idea was conceived by Steak, who brokered the deal with Massive, the leading video game network, on behalf of swiftcover.com. 

Alastair Boyle, Group Account Director at Steak added, “In-Game advertising is a perfect fit for the swiftcover.com brand and their target audience. This is the latest in our drive to use innovative ad formats for the right reasons, rather than jumping on every new media trend.”

Chris James, EMEA Manager at Massive concluded, “We’re very pleased to be working with Steak to select the right in-game placements for swiftcover.com. In-game ads have been shown to have some of the best recall rates around so it’s fantastic that more and more advertisers are now realising the potential of this medium.”

Studies have shown 72% of gamers recall seeing ads for brands in-game. In 2009 there was a 20% increase in average ad recall from the year before and the average brand recommendation lift scores were 29% ahead [MICROSOFT, 2009] 73% of gamers agreed that “ads enhanced the realism of the game” [INTERPRET, 2008]; and that across 600 gamers on Xbox 360 and PC showed that brand familiarity increased by 64%, brand rating increased by 37%, purchase consideration increased by 41% [NIELSEN, 2007].

The campaign from swiftcover.com, the pioneer in online insurance, offered music lovers the chance to create this “Summer’s Hottest Playlist” in collaboration with Absolute Radio.  Building on their ‘Get a Life’ campaign, swiftcover.com extended the campaign theme to encourage users to ‘get a life’ this summer by voting for the summer’s hottest tracks. The campaign devised by Steak, used Facebook as the main hub, hosting an easy-to-use voting application.

A master playlist of 75 tracks was selected by popular Absolute Radio DJs: Christian O’Connell, Geoff Lloyd and Ben Jones.  Spotify and Absolute Radio listeners were prompted by the DJs to visit the Swiftcover Facebook page and voted daily for two weeks via the “sucks” or “rocks” buttons beside the track. This saw the music tracks physically rising and falling, depending on popularity, on the Facebook “chart”.

The final playlist hosted is hosted by Spotify on 22 June through the summer; with Facebook fans, Absolute Radio and Spotify listeners being notified that the winning list can be downloaded and played all summer long.

The idea was conceived by Steak, who is handling the social media and online display campaign.  Audio and display ads including billboards and takeover pages, will appear on Spotify, Absolute Radio and Facebook linking through to swiftcover.com’s Facebook page.  The Facebook app songs then link back to Spotify, which enables visitors to the site to listen to the tracks they’re voting for; and there is an opportunity to win a Spotify premium account for a year.
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Tina Shortle, Marketing Director says, “This is a perfect campaign for the summer – sitting in the park in the sunshine listening to music that you’ve voted for – it epitomises our ‘Get a Life’ campaign.  We’re excited that social media was at the heart of this campaign. Absolute Radio, Facebook and Spotify are the perfect partners for music lovers to create this ‘Summer’s Hottest Playlist’”.

John Barton, Head of Planning and Social Media at Steak says “We wanted to demonstrate how we can effectively integrate social media into our existing through the line digital strategy. This campaign is ultimately about building and fostering relationships between swiftcover.com and their audience in social channels that they’re comfortable with by adding value rather than selling. Music and summer festivals are effective passion point or the swiftcover.com
demographic and form the basis of our content strategy. We are excited and fortunate to work with brands like swiftcover.com who continue to lead the way in digital marketing within the insurance vertical sector”.

Kate Hussey, Head of Display at Steak says “We are excited about enhancing the current Absolute Radio partnership for swiftcover.com along with introducing another key strategic partner, Spotify, as a main driver of our audience. We believe that this campaign has the ability to kick off a summer full of ‘Getting a Life’”.