We are proud to announce that our very own Shorn New Zealand brand won the award for Best Use of Promotion or Competition in Social Media with the #findshorn campaign at The Drum Social Buzz Awards in London earlier this month.

shorn newsWe created the campaign with The Forge Communications to promote the Kingsland own brand.  The idea was simple; create something fun and engaging and reward people for ‘finding Shorn’.

Hannah Kennedy, Brand Manager says: “Shorn is a fun brand and we wanted to show that personality in an engaging way.  We know that social media is a great channel to reach our audience and it gave us the opportunity to do something a bit different.  We were absolutely delighted with the response; it really seemed to catch the imagination.  This award is testament to that.”

The competition was built on Google Maps using Street View. 100,000 white ‘Shorn the Sheep’ were distributed on streets around the UK as well 10,000 black Shorns and one very special golden Shorn.   If players found three black Shorns they were entered into a daily prize draw to win a case of Shorn, but if they found the elusive golden Shorn the prize was an iPad mini and a case of wine.

Clues to the whereabouts of the golden Shorns were announced on the @shornwines twitter feed as well as in various competition websites and partners in exchange for promotion. At the competition’s peak, people were searching for an average of 16 minutes in a session!

socialbuzz-awards-30-11-16-web-128-218742_0Key to the competition’s success was interacting with our players. We told people when they were hot or cold in proximity to the golden Shorn, we named white Shorns after our favourite players and asked them to share a photo if they saw their namesake.  We even gave out 2,500 fridge magnets to reward people for their efforts.

The stats were overwhelming. We had expected around 5,000 entries, but we received 10,706. We hoped for 3,000 unique players, we had 8,734.   But perhaps most importantly the sales data showed a significant increase of around 70% during the time the competition was live.

Look out for Find Shorn 2.0 in 2017!