Britain’s Biggest Fart for Red Nose Day was a tremendous success. M&C Saatchi’s creative concept and its tactical mobile media purchasing campaign resulted in consumers downloading the app more than 100,000 times. The app spent nine days in the Top Ten of the “Entertainment” category on the UK Apple App Store, including three days at No 1. Importantly, the app achieved one of the campaign’s original aims – to engage the difficult target demographic of young men aged between 18 and 35 that had been previously hard-to-reach for Comic Relief. 53% of app activations came from men, of whom 60% were aged 30 or younger. The app also succeeded in engaging consumers who had not previously donated to Comic Relief: 46% of players who used the app were first-time fundraisers. The results of the campaign showed the value of “gamification” as a strategy for engaging audiences.
In other stand-out results from the app campaign, women players took each of the top three positions in the nationwide Comic Relief “Fart rank”. Friends of players donated more money than family members, and half of all players donated to their own fundraising total. “My local fart rank” was the app’s most popular feature among users. Britain’s top “farter” collected 115 farts in total from donors.
The app was so successful that Comic Relief is taking the findings from the app and currently exploring possible opportunities to develop it further.
Commenting on the success of the Britain’s Biggest Fart for Red Nose Day campaign, Dominic Vallely, CEO of TheGivingLab, the company who developed the app, said, “TheGivingLab exists to bring together great new ideas, innovative charities and smart partners to create and test new ideas that benefit UK charities. M&C Saatchi Performance, with their creative smarts, hands-on performance marketing knowledge, immersion in mobile, and bloody good fun and passionate delivery team, were the most awesome partners one could wish for.”
“It is through the generosity and hard work of the advertising networks who kindly donated inventory that we were able succeed in driving the Britain’s Biggest Fart for Red Nose Day appto the top of the charts in the UK,” said James Hilton, Global CEO of M&C Saatchi Performance. “M&C Saatchi Performance is very proud to have created a No1 app, which raised an impressive amount of money for an amazing cause like Red Nose Day.”
