We had the task of breaking into a new media for the brand: Instagram Stories. Sounds like a normal trajectory for Slurpee who have a younger demographic audience, right? Well, they may have a normal trajectory, but they definitely don't have a normal brand. Slurpee is rainbow-filled, cheeky, high-energy, inclusive and taste-quenching. So our challenge was we injecting a little of that into Stories, blowing our audiences expectations of crazy content out of water (or icy cold Slurpee).
We looked at using the existing Story features in mouth-watering ways to create delicious content. We entertained the idea of getting artists to create in-Story pieces of art around content, similar to Instagram legend Sean Charmatz. But it just didn't feel like it would excite our audience enough.
So instead, we transformed a content-viewing platform into a gaming platform to represent the playful, energetic brand and get fans tapping back for more. We hacked Stories by using the left and right functionality in a never-before-seen way to create a high-intensity two-player game of skill.
The gamified and competitive Instagram Story worked by grabbing a mate, tapping as hard and fast as you can to drag the Slurpee onto your side. And the prize? Well, that was up to Slurpers. It worked similar to a wager bet, which saw our weird and wonderful audience bet on things like: wearing a chicken costume in public, eating a tablespoon of hot sauce and of course, many many Slurpees shouted.
Our Slurpers couldn't get enough. After the 24-hour story ended, we saw:
- Close to 400,000 total taps, which is over 4.5 taps a second
- 6 rematches per player
- Facebook recognise it as a Best Practice and Innovation case study
All without a dollar put behind it.
Heaps of Slurpers from around Australia slid into our DMs to let us know their wagers, with plenty of winners scoring a free Slurpee from their mates. Let's just hope we don't receive any complaints of carpal tunnel from too much gameplay in the future!
