Hoagiefest 2009
Hoagies Get Their Groovy On
In 2008 Archer collaborated with Wawa and The Richards Group to launch an award-winning campaign to celebrate one of Wawa’s most popular products – the Shorti hoagie. Over an eight-week period of summer, the promotion offered customers a reduced price on four Shorti varieties, with two varieties featured for two weeks at a time.
Being the first year, we kept the 2008 campaign pretty basic. We weren’t sure how Wawa customers would respond. Long story short, they loved it!
Recipe for Success: Social, Contests, and a Whole Lotta Flash
So now how do we grow Hoagiefest in 2009? How do we tap into the passion of the Wawa Hoagiefest fan? How do we really amplify and extend the campaign? Well, we carried over all the elements that made 2008 a success and mixed in social media, crowdsourcing, creative planning, and a ton of fun.
Archer revived the Hoagiefest microsite, which was the heart of the online ad campaign. For cohesiveness, all other moving parts of the online efforts (banner ads, social media, videos, games, contests, you name it) were in line with the Hoagiefest look and feel – vibrant, kaleidoscopic imagery and Flash-animated objects and characters.
Word of Hungry Mouths: Hoagiefest Meets Facebook
Archer also launched the Wawa Facebook page that year. We leveraged this increasingly popular tool to engage with fans and update them on Hoagiefest contest results, interesting uploads, and, of course, the featured hoagies of the week. We enticed Fans with witty posts, and they commented back – a lot. Since 2009, the Wawa Facebook page has grown to almost 800,000 fans, and our media and social strategy drove almost 1 million unique visits to Hoagiefest.com.
Video and Music Draw Crowd(sourcing)
With this Hoagiefest everything was shareable, from contests and photo submissions to songs and videos. Yes, Archer created a video and music contest site to crowdsource original videos and music from Wawa fans and employees. Some videos received as much as 40,000 unique views!
For the video efforts, Archer worked with YouTube to deliver high-impact, unique placements that were extremely effective. So effective, in fact, that YouTube featured Hoagiefest in one of their case studies.
Ahh, Hoagiefest. We’ve made some really great memories, even more new friends (in the form of fans, that is), and helped Wawa sell a whole lot of hoagies.
