Beyond The Promise: Baby Elephant - Zoo Antwerp

Vincent Jansen and Peter Verbiest present a success story: the buzz about Baby K, the long expected and anticipated birth of the Antwerp Zoo's little elephant.

Web 2,0 collaboration. A new baby elephant was on it's way. Buzz was needed to get more people to the Antwerp zoo. Unique for Belgium and Europe, a deeply and connecting story was growing. Just as the baby elephant did. A positive story in a world of turmoil.

Communicated in a rigidly authentic and genuine way by sharing an echo of the upcoming miracle of life. THANK GOD the option for 'baby elephant song' by Redgi was not put into concrete action.

Campaign start: December 15th, 2008
Possible birth: between February and June 2009
50% mortality rate
Keep interest going until 1st birthday

Launch: 3 key thoughts: Building your own medium, Eventful and Activating.

Baby-olifant.be got launched, a widget site filled with blog posts, video streans, flickr pictures and tons of surrounding information. Birth-alert: let people drop their contact info (email or TXT message) so they can tune in as soon as the birth-phase kicks in. The birth would be streamed live, many clips are hosted on YouTube, they're collected on the site as well.

Next: pick a name. Engaging people to make it personal. Invite them to vote for or suggest names. For the little ones some basic games got created too.

Facebook fan group: 17K fans / Google maps widget (find Astridplein in Antwerp, zoom in on the zoo and you'll see)

Massive 600 sqm projections on buildings in key cities: the echo picture. Media partnerships: a centerfold poster in the newspaper to hang behind your window where you could write your suggested name. Spotters from the zoo drove around in the city, dropped an envelop in the mailbox with 2 entrance tickets to the zoo if they spotted your poster.

So, after the launch, they needed to keep things going. The care takers in the zoo delivered tremendous content, were very passionate to write new articles, make new videos,... to document the entire event.

The birth-blogpost pulled in 12K reaction in one night. (eat that pietel.be)

The digital footprint grew bigger and bigger. The progesteron widget could be placed on blogs and websites. Everyday the values were measured and entered. If the value approached 0, birth was a matter of hours.

6000 people followed the event live on videostream and stayed up all night to witness the event.

To protect the baby elephant, visiting time was limited. On the website you can see every day what time you can visit.

Side-events: birth cards sent out to 4.000.000 families to announce the good news. A baby drink on a public square in Antwerp to celebrate.

Results:

budget: 150K euro / value 3.000.000 Euro (created media attention/buzz)
launch: 500 blog comments / total after birth: 23K
news coverage on CNN and other foreign channels
30K visitors in the zoo after the day of birth
8.243 name
41K registered for updates
1.2 mio people visited the site
5K people signed the birth register