RadioShack Goodbye 80s

About the Project

You may remember the commercial from the 2014 Super Bowl. The headlines the next day read “In Shocking Upset, RadioShack Wins the Super Bowl.” The commercial consisted of a truckload of 80’s celebrities, from Hulk Hogan to Mary Lou Retton to Alf, ransacking a RadioShack store.

The digital component of that campaign was a social media response-driven contest that launched immediately following the commercial. The premise was that roughly every hour for 24 hours 80’s memorabilia was given away.

The website that supported the contest is where I come in.

The Website

Starting at the time of commercial launch, the first giveaway item was displayed on site for people to start tweeting about. Depending on the popularity of the item, the next item may be shown well before or after the hour mark, giving the contest a little bit of randomness, and creating the added component of not being able to automate the timing of the product releases. Additionally, after an undetermined amount of time, the product would expire from the contest. For this reason a CMS needed to come into play.

So that the RadioShack team could easily control the calculated release and expiration of each product throughout the evening and into the next day, a simple WordPress system was set up where each product image, the contest link to Offerpop, and the product’s status of “hidden”, “active”, or “expired” could be managed. This system allowed the CMS administrators the flexibility to release and expire products at will, and successfully hid the upcoming products from the hackers in the general public.

The CMS also gave the administrators a way to expire the entire contest once the giveaway was over.

Other content on the site included:

• The long version of the commercial and other video clips
• Contest rules

Fun Fact

Because the RadioShack in-store terminals could only run Internet Explorer 7, the website supported the old school browser.

Campaign Awards

• 2015 National Addy’s Integrated Campaign: Silver Award Winner
• 2015 National Addy’s Digital Campaign: Silver Award Winner
• 2015 National Addy’s Digital Advertising: Silver Social Media Award Winner
• 2015 New York Festivals World’s best Advertising Finalist
• 2015 District Addy Gold Award Winner
• 2015 Austin Addy’s Best In Show Winner
• 2015 Austin Addy’s Best In Advertising: Gold Award Winner
• 2015 Austin Addy’s Digital Advertising: Gold Social Media Award Winner
• 2015 Austin Addy’s Digital Advertising: Gold Campaign Award Winner
• 2014 Won a Bronze Lion at Cannes
• 2014 Shortlisted in four, Cyber Cannes Lion categories
• 2014 4A’s Jay Chiat Awards for Best Brand Progress/Reinvention
• 2014 ONE Show Merit Awards for Consumer Television
• 2014 ONE Show Merit Awards for Integrated Campaign/Consumer Campaign

View the agency case study