For Christmas 2016, Sports Experts, the largest sports retailer in Quebec, wanted to stand out as an obvious, top-of-mind, go-to gift destination, while educating shoppers about the wide variety of its products, i.e. not just apparel and gear.

Rethink’s communication objectives were two-fold. One was to raise awareness about (and generate) gift ideas by highlighting specific product categories available at Sports Experts.The second objective was to draw attention and engage the audience in such a way that it would amplify the initiative’s reach. The designated playground: social media. The challenge: break through the clutter of all the brands fighting for ad space during the year’s biggest sales period, with a relatively modest budget ($150,000).

Earlier in 2016, Facebook had launched Facebook Live and made it available to brands. However, after much research on the tool broadcast’s best practices, Rethink realized that few brands were really using the technology in a truly interactive way.

Rethink’s approach was opportunistic -- the agency wanted to exploit the potential of the Facebook Live algorithm to its fullest. Its initiative had to be engaging enough to quickly generate multiple clicks, immediately amplifying reach and building up the live audience. The best way to achieve this would be a live, user-controlled game that integrates and showcases different categories of products (or "gift ideas").

The big idea: a live, interactive crane game, similar to those found in bars and arcades, controlled by the entire community through four Facebook emoticons -- like, love, wow, haha -- that would allow them to grab and win different gift prizes. The community had to coordinate and collaborate in order to precisely position the crane before activating it (and thus catch a gift). Each captured gift was then awarded randomly to one of the participants. People could get swag ranging from GoPros, FitBit monitors and sports gear. The participants frantically interacted with Facebook and commented in real time, dramatically increasing the engagement rate and reach, and taking full advantage of the medium’s algorithm. Most of the budget was allocated to the production of the crane. However, success did not rely only on organic reach.

Rethink needed to generate interest and build up hype before the broadcasts. A few sponsored publications, as well as media partnerships -- with fashion, sports and tech blogs, mostly -- helped promote the upcoming broadcasts (four in total, lasting 60 minutes each, in early December 2016). The machine being reaction-powered, users who interacted ended up promoting the live feed at the same time, creating a promotional chain reaction.

In total, Grab-a-gift generated 2.2 million impressions, more than half completely organic (for scale, the province’s population where the brand operates is 8.2M people). Median viewing time surpassed the 8-minute mark, a number exponentially higher than the platform’s benchmarks and best practices. Sports Experts managed to break through the noise and raise awareness, so much so that sales for that period increased 15% vs the previous year, while reducing its ad spend.