The Intel sponsored “History of IT” campaign, marking 40 years of IT and the 40th anniversary of Computing magazine, earned the award “Best B2B Social Media Campaign, Best Technology Social Media Campaign.”
Produced by the Web Marketing Association, the Internet Advertising Competition is an annual awards program that honours excellence in online advertising, recognizes the individuals and organizations responsible, and showcases the best in Internet advertising.
“This award shows that tech marketers can deliver effective social engagement with customers in partnership with B2B media,” said Computing publisher Tom Wright, “particularly when it’s backed with strong creative work”.
“We wanted to engage readers in a new and innovative way, and we did that through this interactive timeline,” said Stuart Dommett, UK Business Marketing Manager at Intel. “The last 40 years were filled with great innovations from Intel and the industry; it was fantastic to see those innovations shared via social media.”
The campaign centred on an interactive timeline celebrating the key IT events of the last 40 years and some fun future predictions. Users voted for their favourite moments by tweeting their vote, engaging users and spreading the word at the same time.
Alongside this, an animated info-graphic video was made to launch the campaign at the UK IT Awards in November, requesting attendees to kick-off the event by voting. Each vote enlarged the graphic on the timeline showing visually which IT events were the most popular which was mirrored across the Computing and Intel sites.
Thunderclap was used to store up the tweets and release them a week later, all at once. The effect was a generation of 4,200 combined votes across the Computing and Intel sites creating a trending hashtag #historyofIT.
“Each vote was a tweet that spread the word further, each element of the timeline grew in real time in response to its voting popularity” said Arran D’Aubigny, Managing Director of Mind Orchard who produced the creative, “this is the future of info-graphic marketing; responsive, reactive and social.”
