With 30.8 million plays, Virgin Active’s Sofa Bash is one of the most successful advergames of all time
Objective:
Virgin Active is one of the UK’s leading health and fitness clubs. As part of their 2008 marketing strategy, Virgin Active wanted to get more potential customers coming into the gym by distributing free day passes within digital content that would entertain and engage the audience.
Activity:
Our response to this was to create a digital stress toy based on a sofa that users could destroy within a 30 second time limit. Our creative team came up with a selection of weapons including ray guns and samurai swords to obliterate the sofa with. We wanted to give users a reason to play the game multiple times while creating an experience that they would want to share.
Click to view:
Sofa Bash game
Results:
Within the period that the game distributed the day pass voucher, Virgin Active saw a huge uptake in footfall and subsequent membership. Since then, the game has grown into one of the most successful viral games ever. It has currently had 30.8million plays from 20.8 million unique individuals. This statistic includes 1.05 million plays in the first week of launch.
Despite the game only lasting 30 seconds, the average user will repeat play for over 4 minutes.
The campaign was a finalist in the 2009 NMA Effectiveness Awards for the “Best Use of Viral”. Due to the exceptional results of the campaign, Seema Sharma, Campaign Manager at Virgin Active had this to say: “The Sofa Bash game TAMBA produced for us as a fundamental component in Virgin Active’s marketing strategy was produced within incredibly tight deadlines. Despite the lack of time TAMBA fulfilled the brief and the game has received great viewing figures which in turn has increased hits to the Virgin Active website. We wouldn’t hesitate in recommending TAMBA for a superb product with reliable service that answers the brief.”
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