iso3D - Canada's largest branded 3D projection takes over Union Station in Toronto

On Saturday, October 2nd, Sensodyne iso-active presented an all-night projection art event at Toronto’s landmark Union Station. GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) the makers of Sensodyne, led by their Canadian agency Grey Canada, worked with Tantrum Design & Visual Effects, Media Merchants and Silent Joe to create the largest ever, first branded, 3D projection mapping display in Canada: iso3D.

OBJECTIVE

The objective was to create an innovative display, in keeping with Sensodyne iso-active’s new innovative foaming toothpaste technology, that would appeal to a young and vibrant urban demographic. In order to garner authentic interest from Nuit Blanche attendees (taking place on the same night), Grey kept branding to a minimum, positioning the project as art, “brought to you by Sensodyne iso-active.” The projection leveraged the building’s own architectural features to “clean and crumble” Union Station, featuring foamy visuals that subversively highlighted the foaming technology.

STRATEGY
To get the word out, Grey Canada executed a strategic social media push the week of the event. Executive Creative Director Carl Jones explains the choice to use social media as the primary mode of communication: “Social media is the perfect vehicle to publicize a guerilla-style advertising display to media and consumers. With Neilson stats showing us that consumers trust recommendations through social media sources at a rate of 90%, we knew the best way to get past consumers ‘advertising filter’ would be person to person, over social networks.”
Grey facilitated a wave of seeding on Twitter, Foursquare and through a Facebook event page, focusing on the buzzword “iso3D,” which was also seeded within an ad in Metro the day before the event. To further facilitate, Grey reached out to all the partners involved, and supported GSK in engaging other product stakeholders (suppliers etc.) in a unified social media effort.
Jones explains the approach: “As an agency we are committed to creating digital projects that are of genuine interest to our target demographics. We ask ourselves, ‘Would we share this with our friends?’ It’s about advertising being what’s interesting, rather than being the interruption. As a result of doing that type of work, we want to share it with our own networks, aiding in the seeding process. It’s a new way of doing digital that Grey has embraced.”

RESULTS
With Grey’s efforts supported by all the partners involved on the project, the social media campaign was a huge success.
Approaching the event, iso3D was voted the 3rd most popular “tip” on Foursquare for Union Station, a busy commuter hub and entry point of Toronto.

On the Facebook event page, the option to invite friends generated a total of over 7,000 organic, person to person invites, with RSVP’s coming in by the minute. The engagement rate on Facebook dramatically beat Facebook averages, with over 80% of those who RSVP’ed engaging with the event page (for example by inviting others, posting on the wall, or “Liking” a comment), a strong indication of consumer enthusiasm surrounding the event.

A targeted Toronto-area Facebook ad campaign, executed through media partner MediaVest, took awareness to the next level with 3.2 million impressions.
Twitter was abuzz with the #iso3D hastag, generating a number of high-influencer (800-5,000+ followers) mentions in the targeted demographic, and nearly 100 Twitter mentions overall.
On the night of the event, iso3D grabbed Toronto’s attention with an estimated 500K total impressions in street traffic, leading to numerous user-generated YouTube videos of the spectacle. Combined with Grey’s official
video on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHRYbgyFz5I), released a couple days after the event, the total online viewership of this piece has been upward of 3,000, and continues to grow.

Blog posts that feature the event videos have popped up internationally, as well as locally, including exposure on Virgin 999 and 680 News amongst others, generating further views.

Grey Canada
Executive Creative Director: Carl Jones