DirecTV: PETITE LAP GIRAFFE

Credits & Description:

Category: Best Use of Online Advertising

Advertiser: DIRECTV

Product/Service: TELECOM

Agency: GREY NEW YORK

Date of First Appearance: Mar 23 2011

Entrant Company: GREY NEW YORK, USA

Entry URL: http://www.petitelapgiraffe.com/

Preaident/Chief Creative Officer: Tor Myhren (Grey New York)

Executive Creative Director: Todd Tilford (Grey New York)

Creative Director: Luis Romero/Chris Rubino (Grey New York)

Copywriter: Heather English (Grey New York)

Digital Executive Creative Director: Perry Fair (Grey New York)

Senior Designer: Craig Ward (Grey New York)

Producer: David Cardinali (Grey New York)

Digital Strategist: Lisa Baldini (Grey New York)

Global Technology Director: Chad Sutton (Grey New York)

Print Studio: Joe Raffio/Doug Fornuff (Grey New York)

Account Executive: Beth Culley/Tamar Arslanian/Dustin Newman (Grey New York)

Creative Director: Ben Smith (The Mill)

Producer: Jared Yeater (The Mill)

Creative Technologist: Andrew Bell (The Mill)

Executive Producer: Bridget Sheils/Adam Isidore (The Mill)

Producer/Director of Photography: Alex Maxwell (The Mill)

User Experience: Chris McKenzie (The Mill)

Developer: Michal Kopanski/Jak Wilkins (The Mill)

Editor: Ryan McKenna/Jessica Ledoux/Frank Rowe (The Mill)

Animation: Joshua Merk/Pete Devlin/Navdeep Singh/Thomas Bardwell/Chris Berneir/Joji Tsuruga (The Mill)

Media placement: MICROSITE - WEB - 23 MARCH 2011



Insights, Strategy & the Idea

Our challenge was to continue separating and elevating DIRECTV from its competitors as well as leverage the success of “Opulence”, if not top it. Like the “Opulence” spot, we would again be talking to the modern TV viewer, who is active, not passive, about their entertainment consumption. They expect more, and look beyond TV to get it. For DIRECTV to further differentiate themselves from their competitors, they would need to be in those places. Where DIRECTV needed to be and where we found the unique insight were one and the same: online.



Online the Russian billionaire and his diminutive companion had become a MEME, creating enormous demand for DIRECTV and petite lap giraffes. We then fed that demand by creating a fictitious breeders site for the fictitious petite lap giraffe. Petitelapgiraffe.com threw more gasoline on the fire, further ingraining DIRECTV in pop culture.



Creative Execution

Being that our Modern TV viewer spends a lot of time online AND online is a mecca for anything and everything cute or animal related - our creative solution needed to also live online. And knowing that there was a not-so-secret consumer desire for the “Opulence” giraffe to be real and obtainable, we created a breeder’s site for petite lap giraffes and made it incredibly believable. Key to believability was our Giraffe Cam that streamed a 24 hour live feed from the Sokoblovksy Farms in Russia. This allowed viewers to see with their own eyes the real time activities of a giraffe on the farm. Customers submitted pictures, videos sent from our Russian Oligarch and the ability to sign up for your own petite lap giraffe all worked very hard to keep the believability alive and keep consumers coming back for more.



Results and Effectiveness

In just over a week, and with zero media dollars, the site had over 10 million views from over 185 countries and the waitlist for a petite lap giraffe had swelled to over 700,000. Wanting to believe, over 3 million visitors spent an average of 2.5 minutes per visit looking at every page on the site. And within less than 24 hours after launching the site, CNBC picked up the story stating that the site was “taking over the web” and relayed DIRECTV’s very real growth: 4.1 million gross subscribers and a 9% increase in revenue over the previous year.