HTC P3470 French Launch

HTC designs, manufactures and markets innovative, feature rich smartphone and PDA devices.

Founded in 1997, they are one of the fastest growing companies in the mobile device sector. Business Week rated the company as the 11th fastest growing global technology company in the world.

The objective

The brief was to create a microsite that customers on the Orange France site could visit to find out more about this new handset. The content on the Orange France site is very factual and the new site had to balance this with a more experiential treatment. The core objective therefore was to attract people to visit this new site and increase their propensity to choose this handset as a result.

The solution

This was a fascinating challenge for us because the brief was really asking us to create an interruption to the shopper's buying process. Anyone who knows digital will tell you that the more linear and fluid the buying flow, the better. As a result we had to be careful not to create an interruption that ended up in lost sales.  We felt therefore, that the solution lay in creating a linear detour that delivered visitors back to where they started. The result being to maintain a linear, and effective, buying process.

The environment we created is informative (in that it communicates the phone's features) as well as being enjoyable and, primarily, memorable. The recall aspect was also really important to us as we knew that many customers would continue shopping around after looking at this site.

To meet the brief we came up with a concept that takes the visitor on a trip across Paris. A journey that's part game and part tour of the phone's features.

The central part is the section demonstrating the phone's 2Megapixel camera where you're challenged to capture the events happening at the Eiffel Tower. On arrival, you discover that the event is a little more unusual than you expected - a giant woman is chased up the side of the tower by helicopters.

The result

This site was only promoted within Orange France but it received nearly 1,000,000 visits in 3 months, with an average session length of just under 5 minutes. This represents nearly 100,000 hours spent engaging with the brand. HTC and Orange France were delighted with this performance and, of course, the resulting uplift in sales.