After a highly successful print campaign, Bacardi USA took its Bombay Sapphire marketing online. With the help of a Flash application, the company soon had consumers designing their own martini glasses.

January 13, 2002
URL:http://www.drdobbs.com/one-part-gin-two-parts-branding/184411615

One of Dale Carnegie's principles for winning friends and influencing people was to "let the other person do the talking." Last May, MFP Interactive (MFPI), the Web division of Margeotes Fertitta and Partners, partnered with Web development group Mass Transmit to devise a novel way of applying that idea to gin. Of course, gin on its own is known to get people talking. But the two agencies found a way to get people to express their feelings about Bombay Sapphire premium gin without even touching a drop. Their secret: interactivity.

MFPI has partnered with Mass Transmit before. The two companies are on different floors of the same building in lower Manhattan. The former is an ad agency. The latter refers to itself as an "interactive and streaming media solutions provider." This means, among other things, that Mass Transmit developers are Macromedia Flash wizards.

Hard Acts to Follow

In fall 2000, Bacardi USA, which markets and distributes Bombay Sapphire gin in the United States, approached MFPI with the challenge of developing interactive marketing concepts for the famous blue-bottled beverage. MFPI and Mass Transmit jumped at the chance to add a new dimension to Bacardi's domestic marketing efforts.

Coming up with an online concept for Bombay Sapphire wasn't an easy job. There were already plans for an enhanced Bombay Sapphire Web site (www.bombaysapphire.com), which was scheduled for launch in April 2001. This site now features subtle alpha transitions and a sophisticated navigational interface, which executives hope will suggest the subtle flavor and sophistication of the beverage. Half of the site is devoted to the product, and the other half to high culture, including notable people, architecture, furniture, industrial design, and graphic art. Built by Deepend, a New York-based Web design firm, and consisting entirely of Flash 5 animation, the site reflects Bacardi's strategy of identifying Bombay Sapphire with the glamorous world of contemporary design.

Bacardi's famous print campaign, which has been running continuously since 1992, is the only print advertising ever done for Bombay Sapphire, and it contributed to a 15 percent sales growth in 2001. The ads, running in upscale magazines like The New Yorker and Vanity Fair, feature one-of-a-kind martini glasses created by big-name designers such as Karim Rashid and Dakota Jackson. The idea is to remind potential customers that the martini, as symbolized by these exquisite glasses, is a classy drink.

As MFPI and Mass Transmit were starting to plan the interactive campaign, they were aware that Bacardi was also garnering good publicity through other projects involving the design community. For example, the company sponsors scholarships for minority and disadvantaged design students through The Worldstudio Foundation at www.worldstudio.org.

The Killer App

So what could MFPI and Mass Transmit bring to the party that wasn't

already provided by the successful sites and the ad campaign? Interactivity. The partners focused on the uniquely interactive nature of the Web, its ability to actively involve users in a promotion on a global scale. The existing Bombay Sapphire Web site, though stunning in its production values and execution, was designed almost entirely for one-way communication: from Bacardi to its customers. Mass Transmit's idea would take a page from Dale Carnegie, and let the customers do the talking.

Mass Transmit had already experimented with creating Web content that would entice people to interact with a brand. For instance, it created a "menu scramble" game for Denny's Restaurants. In the process of deciphering REOO COESKIO AND MCERA IEP at Dennys.com, customers learn about items on the Denny's menu. The game sometimes shows up while customers wait to download large files, and it can also be reached through the site's standard navigation.

When Macromedia released Flash 5 in August 2000, Mass Transmit realized that it could take interactive content to a new level with the tool's upgraded ActionScript scripting language. Flash 5 ActionScript is essentially a version of JavaScript for the Flash environment. (Both languages are based on the ECMA-262 standard.) In particular, Mass Transmit saw Flash 5 as the perfect tool for building a Web-based application that would let users create their own animation online.

Mass Transmit had produced some create-your-own-animation prototypes for clients, but nothing ever went live. When Mass Transmit and MFPI started brainstorming about Bombay Sapphire, one idea seemed like a natural choice, given Bacardi's popular print campaign. They would create a make-your-own-martini-glass application.

"It was one of those rare moments in the business when you could feel a great idea walk into the room, introduce itself to everyone around the table, and become part of us," recalls Hal Williams, MFPI's director of interactive services. "One person would start the sentence, and the next would finish it, and in a matter of minutes, we had the basic idea hammered out."

The teams agreed the technology could fulfill Bacardi's goals for branding, marketing, and collecting contact information for future campaigns. It complemented the traditional print campaign and further promoted Bombay Sapphire's involvement with the design community.

When the teams presented the idea to Bacardi USA, the company approved it with little hesitation. So began several months of intense development with a group consisting of Williams from Margeotes; five people from Mass Transmit (two programmers, two designers, and one manager); and from Bacardi Global Brands, Marketing Manager Cristi Moser and Global Manager of Online Marketing and E-Commerce Gary Chau.

Building Asexpressedbyyou.com

The result of the group's work is AsExpressedByYou.com, launched on October 1, 2001. Site visitors don't just select fixed components to design martini glasses—they control properties such as rotation, scale, color, and transparency. Figure 1 shows the interface.

Adam Holden-Bache and Mark Lewis, CEO and CTO respectively of Mass Transmit, were at the technical helm of the project, managing the day-to-day mechanics of grinding out the ActionScript code and producing the graphical content. They worked within the tight guidelines typical of any well-established brand.

figure 1: Bacardi USA uses Flash animation to get consumers to interact with its campaign for Bombay Sapphire gin.

As the brand owner, Bacardi had detailed specifications on how things had to look visually and textually. For instance, Bacardi guidelines don't allow the use of dull blue in marketing materials. The result of such a rule is that consumers have learned to associate Bombay Sapphire with brilliant blue on a white background. Similarly, there are to be no rounded or beveled corners on line boxes. Bombay Sapphire style decrees clean, 90-degree corners. The brand manual also contains rules about using Bacardi's proprietary fonts, each designed for a particular use, such as logo, body text, or press release. The site went through several iterations based on these kinds of issues, says Chau.

Because the application and content have a total footprint of 675KB, which includes a variety of graphical elements and several musical backgrounds, the developers knew they had to find a way to minimize program load time. Otherwise, a lot of users would become discouraged and click away to another site. Mass Transmit reduced wait time by implementing the application as a lot of small SWF files—over 100 of them. Only ten files, including five sound files, are over 17KB in size. Most of the other files—for the bases, stems, and tops of the glasses—are very small. A full 76 of them are just 1KB apiece. The site works reasonably well even on a 28.8KBps modem.

Although Flash streams graphics and sound so that animations start to play before they're fully downloaded, having small files makes it easy to display a separate "loading" message for each of the background images. This message alerts the user as soon as a background is loaded, so that he or she can start to use available backgrounds immediately.

Site visitors can choose from a dozen backgrounds—six animated and six static. The user chooses one from a thumbnail-like display. These backgrounds aren't exactly thumbnails because they're complete backgrounds reduced in display size with the Flash scaling function. This reduction doesn't lessen the number of bytes in the files, so they take a little longer to load than true thumbnails would. The advantage is that when you click on one of them, the full-size image jumps immediately into the workspace because it's already loaded.

After creating a martini glass, the artist can email friends a message containing a link to his or her chef-d'oeuvre. Many visitors have taken advantage of this viral marketing feature. Some have even used it to invite others out for a drink!

Development & Infrastructure

With the exception of Flash, Mass Transmit used mostly open source development tools and platforms. Contact information for site visitors is stored in a MySQL database running under Red Hat Linux. The SWF files that make up the martini glasses (each glass is typically composed of six to ten small files) are also stored in the database. The Web server is Apache 1.3.20. All of the software runs on one 500MHz Pentium III Hewlett-Packard LPr with 256MB of RAM. The Mass Transmit team notes that the infrastructure, hosted by Interland, has caused very few problems. When I talked with the team, the server had been up for four months without a reboot.

Most of the database access functions are implemented via PHP 4.0.6. However, PHP didn't have the functionality necessary to retrieve and display a specific martini glass when a visitor's friend clicked on a link that he or she received in a "postcard" email. To get around this, Mass Transmit implemented SWF access via Swift-Generator, a dynamic Flash content generator from Swift-Tools. A unique ID for the glass is included as a parameter with the link in the email. For example, www.asexpressedbyyou.com/receive.php?id=012589113478 is a functional link to what is no doubt the world's only deep-diving all-titanium submersible martini glass!

The receive.php script passes the ID to Swift-Generator, which embeds the ID in a Flash template (SWT) file. The SWFs that make up the martini glass are loaded into the SWT file based on the ID. The SWT file also triggers another PHP file to do the actual MySQL database lookup and generate an XML document with all of the Flash object properties (like position, rotation, and color) necessary to recreate the design.

Swift-Generator is a full-function content generator, but in this case it's only used to put the ID into the SWT. "We could have just provided the user a text entry field in the [SWT] file to enter the ID," notes Lewis. "However, clicking a link with the ID in it is less hassle for the user." More complex Swift-Generator functions could be implemented using Swift-Generator-specific scripting contained in an SWS file. There is an SWS file in this case as well, but it only tells Swift-Generator the SWT file's location and puts Swift-Generator in CGI mode.

Getting glasses to display correctly on retrieval from the database wasn't always easy. The Flash SWT file had some difficulty recreating the design. These problems were apparently related to small (single-frame) delays in the availability of Flash property values, resulting in incorrect display properties like positioning and rotation. It took some careful coding to ensure that objects weren't displayed by Flash before their correct properties were known.

Mass Transmit made sure the application would run smoothly for all users by testing it on a variety of Windows computers and Macs, using both Netscape 4+ and MS Internet Explorer 4+ browsers. The team reviewed, among other things, plug-in detection, load time, and overall performance. Team members also tested the site on a 28.8 KBps modem on older Windows and Mac machines (like the Win 98/P233 and Mac 7100/66 OS8.5), measuring how much time passed before the user could begin creating the glass.

Emails sent by the application were viewed on a variety of clients, including Outlook, Outlook Express, AOL, Entourage, Eudora, Lotus Notes, and browser-based services like Hotmail, Netscape, Excite, and Yahoo. Mass Transmit even checked for plain text vs. HTML display and accurate HTML rendering.

Signs of Success

There are many indications that Bacardi executives, Bombay Sapphire consumers, and industry observers think that AsExpressedByYou.com is a success. For example, Bacardi is expanding the campaign from the U.S. to the world market. Bacardi will ask several contemporary designers to create their own glasses. And the company is now giving away limited-edition Bombay Sapphire bar sets for the best glasses created by site visitors.

From the October 1, 2001 launch through November 26, 2001, visitors created 8,921 glasses. (See Table 1 for access stats.) About two-thirds of the users provided email addresses on an opt-in basis, which Bacardi can use in future promotions. "These are people creating glasses just for fun and emailing to friends," notes Chau. "Once we start the global promotion, I'm certain we'll get an even higher level of participation."

The average visitor spends five minutes on the AsExpressedByYou.com site. Over 15 percent of visitors spend more than 20 minutes. At a time when visitors often leave Web sites in a matter of seconds, between 5 and 20 minutes is a solid accomplishment for the team.

In mid-November 2001, the site won the Best Beverage Web Site award in the 2001 WebAward Competition sponsored by the Web Marketing Association. In December 2001, it was a finalist in the Best Branding Campaign category at the AdTech awards.

One of the biggest lessons that the team learned from the site is that promotion via email works. "We see dramatic spikes on days when [promotional] email is being distributed," says Chau. On the day of the email there is a large spike, followed by a smaller spike on day two. Traffic slowly decreases on days three and four until, by day five, it's back to the normal level maintained by banner ads and viral pass-around.

In future versions, the team plans to focus on its visitors who abandon ship in the first minute. Bacardi is considering testing the site without the opening movie, which will let users access the creative tool almost immediately. "As we've seen...people who do finish glasses indicate in their emails that they've had a lot of fun doing it," says Chau. "So we know it's a great thing if people stay with it and can do it quickly."

Michael ([email protected]) is a technical journalist and Flash animator. You can visit his Web site at www.hurwicz.com.

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