Campaign: Start Wearing Purple
Client: Yahoo
Agency: Yahoo
Yahoo wanted to rally users around its iconic Internet brand in the face of increasing Web audience fragmentation and came up with a grassroots campaign built around a passion for its signature purple color and driving adherents to a special Flash-based microsite that housed the creative assets.
StartWearingPurple.com launched Sept. 15, 2008, and showcased the campaign’s components. These included Purple Pedals, a fleet of bicycles equipped with solar-powered cameras to take photos every 60 seconds. The Internet-enabled cameras shot photos every 60 seconds, geo-tagged them with GPS and uploaded them to both the microsite and to Flickr, yahoo’s photo sharing platform.
Other elements on the site honored six “Purple Pioneers,” individuals with independent vision and drive such as the founder of a microfinancing NGO. Visitors could also watch clips of stunts (“Purple Pranks”) performed by an improve troupe, such as gathering slowly in an elevator and suddenly breaking into the song ‘Start Wearing Purple” by the band Gogol Bordello. Videos resided on the site but spread virally through Yahoo Video and YouTube.
Preliminary results showed that the site received more than two million visitors—175% of target– who spent on average 4 minutes per visits and opened 51,000 video streams. Affinity Web sites posted 117 stories on content from the Yahoo site, including 64 original posts.
Network
