Cape Town Tourism’s Facebook campaign, My Cape Town Holiday, has won a Cannes Lions Gold Award in the Branded Content category. Cape Town Tourism partnered with Ogilvy & Mather to conceptualise the campaign, while Flow Communications programmed the Facebook app that underpinned the campaign.
The campaign invited Facebook users to send their Facebook profiles on a virtual holiday to Cape Town, with the chance of winning the trip for real. Those who played along got to compile a travel itinerary and received a “boarding pass” and regular, picture-rich updates about their profiles’ activities and experiences in Cape Town. Players could share their experiences and invite friends to send their profiles to Cape Town too. All players were automatically entered into a competition for a real trip to Cape Town, flights, accommodation and experiences included. The main prize was won by Canadian Jan van der Leeuw.
The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity is held in France every year and is widely regarded as the world’s largest advertising festival. Ogilvy & Mather was one of only two 2013 Gold Award winners from South Africa. Last month, the same campaign was awarded a SMITTY (Travel + Leisure‘s award programme) for the Best Overall Use of Social Media globally.
“This campaign was executed in record time, with minimal funds,” said Cape Town Tourism CEO Mariëtte du Toit-Helmbold. “It required incredible trust and the combined effort of our Cape Town Tourism team and our passionate creative agencies, Ogilvy Cape Town and Flow Communications. Not only was the campaign fun, original and successful, it has been recognised as a global best by both the tourism sector [SMITTY Awards] and now by the creative world at Cannes.”
Flow designed and developed all the technical aspects of the Facebook campaign in a concentrated team effort that involved three PHP developers, a designer, and several project managers.
Roy Barford, manager of Flow Communications’ Cape Town office, added: “It’s great to see the My Cape Town Holiday campaign getting such excellent international recognition. Only two Cannes Lions awards came back to South Africa this year, so it’s good to have played a part in making one of them happen – congratulations to Cape Town Tourism and Ogilvy.”