Revels Eviction

Skive was approached by AMV BBDO to deliver the integral digital component to its Revels Eviction campaign, for client Mars.

The idea was to generate public debate and participation in 'evicting' the least popular of Revels' six flavours out of the bag — to be replaced by a mystery new flavour.

The campaign included a TVC and print work pointing to an engaging microsite featuring original video footage, where users could 'vote' and watch their least favourite Revel be expelled in a variety of methods.

From there they were also directed to discussion groups on Facebook, where they could defend maligned flavours or whip up support to oust the most unpopular.

AMV were responsible for the creative direction and print work, but skive were very much involved in the planning of the campaign — from the shoot to online media — all of which had an exceptionally short lead time.

Revels is a very British confectionary brand, and the digital campaign was fronted by an archetypal eccentric Brit, dressed as a removal man and filmed on the white cliffs of Dover. Users pick their least favourite Revel, and then choose how to dispose of it, before the latest eviction leaderboard is revealed.

With such a lot of video footage, many recommendations needed to be made — from hosting to canvas size to green screen and looping. Voting needed to be secure, and a captcha code was integrated so that users couldn't abuse the voting mechanic by auto-running scripts.

The site was built in Flash 9 using the latest video compression, and a decision was made to use progressive download rather than stream the video so that users didn't have to wait for buffering.

Additionally, users could read what people on Facebook were saying, with comments dynamically fed to the site via XML.

skive also used some of the eviction clips for rich media expandable banners, and adapted the print work for standard banners.

The campaign was a great success and made Revels number one in its category sales. With a target of 100,000 votes, there were nearly 400,000 in total - with 150,000 cast from within the rich media ads.

It was little surprise the sorry loser was coffee, which was replaced by a limited edition Strawberry flavour.

There were also 2000 wall posts on Facebook, and extensive media and PR coverage.