Monopoly World Vote - a Viral Marketing Success
Over the last few months you more than likely would have heard some of the hype surrounding the Monopoly World Vote. It was hard not to. It spread prolifically through email and word of mouth, was blogged about repeatedly, had huge forum and discussion group involvement and made the news all over the world. It has proven to be a hugely successful and well engineered viral marketing campaign that has spread globally and received an incredible amount of attention and coverage - and it’s not over yet.
Hasbro, the makers of the Monopoly board game, did some incredibly smart marketing with the development of their first ever global edition of the popular game, called ‘Here & Now - The World Edition’. It was a simple idea - replace the iconic properties of the original game with some of the major cities of the world. To do so, they devised an international campaign to involve the global public by allowing them to vote for the 20 cities (out 68 worldwide) to be included in the new edition game.
Within a matter of days, the campaign went viral. Fans the world over urged friends and strangers to vote for their home city or town. Multiple Facebook groups were created and news stories in many countries encouraged their citizens to register and cast their vote.
Here in New Zealand, Queenstown was the only city to make the short list and it too resulted in local news coverage to encourage Kiwis to get on board. The polls closed on February 29th but the buzz continued when a second round vote was carried out for two ‘wildcard’ places. Voters could nominate places, meaning a lot of the smaller, lesser known cities had a chance to make the cut, including Auckland, which made the top 20. Voting for these closed late March.
The microsite where the voting took place (which now redirects to the Hasbro’s site) required an email registration to participate, and allowed for just one vote for one city per person per day. The collection of email addresses was a smart move, as not only did it limit ballot box stuffing, but emails will likely be used to notify voters with campaign updates and of course the release of the new game itself.
So just how successful was the campaign?
- As at the time of this post, Google reports 27,900 pages when searching for ‘monopoly world vote’ and 34,200 for ‘www.monopolyworldvote.com‘. Yahoo! returned 11,700,000 pages and MSN 2,600,000 pages for ‘monopoly world vote’.
- According to Technorati, there were 991 blog reactions to www.monopolyworldvote.com in a range of languages from all over the world.
- A whopping 258 Facebook Groups were created to encourage voting among friends and networks in several countries.
- And according to Quantcat the site received 53,424 unique visits each month from the US alone. Alexa reported a peak of close to 19 million page views daily.
And then there was the news. The Monopoly World Vote made headlines the world over, such as here, here, here and here.
So why was this campaign so successful?
- Hasbro have hit the nail on the head with this concept. Monopoly is a a good old family favourite. It’s a universally enjoyed game which embodies nostalgic memories of childhood and youth. It is already one of the world’s best selling board games, so the campaign was an innovative way to revamp and generate interest in an old product.
- The microsite was well-designed, colourful and user-friendly . It engaged the user and included an interactive map showcasing which countries were in the lead.
- The end result is essentially a user-generated product which involved people across the globe, from die-hard monopoly fans, city proud people, to patriotic citizens of smaller, lesser known countries.
- The idea has fantastic viral appeal and is a perfect ’social media’ fit - the numerous blogs and Facebook groups are a testament to this.
- And then there is the multi-phase approach. First there was the vote for the major cities, then the vote on the two wildcard places, and in August the final results will be revealed. Finally there is the release of the game itself which is sure to generate further buzz and word of mouth when it hits the shops - fingers crossed Queenstown makes the cut!