Respect the intelligence of your audience.

Promote straightforward and honest communications.

Be transparent.

These are simple, but powerful, rules for marketers to follow. But, unfortunately, it’s rare when even the best marketing organizations subscribe to these fundamental beliefs of effective relationship building today.

That’s why this YouTube communications from McDonald’s Canada called ”Why our food looks better in advertising than in real life,” is so refreshingly terrific. With this online video, McDonald’s follows the simple rules mentioned above and, in doing so, is building a more significant relationship with its customers.

Talk about honest interaction with the customer. Check this out…

Absolutely love this.

Your customers are smart people. They are in tune with this modern world.  And, they know a lot more about what is really going on than you probably think.

And, as smart people, they want to learn more honest, intriguing and relevant stuff.

So give it to them.  And then watch a more honest and deeper bond develop between you and your customers.

McDonald’s gave all us marketers a ‘break today’ by putting out smart communications like this.  Well done.

We in the advertising biz live in a world of inexact science.  This ‘not knowing’ aspect can make for many hand wringling, sweat induced times.

Your team comes up with a great idea, your client buys in, and then the team works timelessly to execute the idea.   And then you…… wait.

Will it work?

That is the simple question that is dancing in your head at 3am the night before a campaign launch.  After hours upon hours, and weeks upon weeks of hard work of putting an idea into action – the question will remain.  Will anybody buy it?  Will anyone engage with our idea?

Because here’s the cruel fact of our business – no idea is really a good idea… unless it works.

At Big River, our creative and digital team recently launched a brave new pioneering effort called “JeepSeeker” for our client The Virginia Lottery.

JeepSeeker is a game which is free for all Virginians of legal age to play utilizing their mobile phone (or their tablets, laptops or desktops).  Through their smart devices, the experiential  players get clues from our main Lottery dude – GameGuy.  By answering these clues, they have a chance of winning a brand new Jeep Wrangler Rubicon.

Pretty cool, huh?  And, very strategically smart.

A particular challenge for the Lottery (actually all lotteries) is to engage a digital savvy, more experiential audiences with their games.  There is just so much else out there for this crowd to become involved in other than the Lottery games.  So, the business question is:  ”How do we engage this crowd with games from the Virginia Lottery?”

So, JeepSeeker – a fun, engaging, digital game – was developed.

On the surface, JeepSeeker had all the key marketing ingridients to be a success.

#1 – Total client support. Perhaps most important, the client was “in it” with us.  This was a “we all win, or we all loose” together proposition.  No bold new ideas happen without this approach from the client.  Thank you Virginia Lottery.

#2 – Super strategic thinking. Disciplined marketing strategy is all about tying specific business goals with a particular audience.  That takes courage.   Everyone was very clear about the audience that JeepSeeker was attempting to engage – this digitally adept crowd.   Furthermore, the program was designed around a total understanding of this audience and how they live their lives.   Key to success in this new world of marketing today, JeepSeeker was about connecting with the customers’ world, and on their terms.

#3 – Cool digital product.  The Big River digital team along with our partners at CoLab and the Virginia Lottery’s IT team were all in to make this thing sing on all types of mobile phones and the web.  Late nights of trial and error in building the digital masterpiece were involved.  These guys were totally committed to getting this right.

#4 – Engaging JeepSeeker concept.  Big River’s creative team developed an awesome inspiring concept for the program that really appealed to our target.  The fun, excitement and coolness of the effort was all incorporated in the JeepSeeker campaign.  (I know that I have used the word “cool” a lot here – but hey, that’s what this effort is.)

But, with all this……..will it work.

I am estactic to report that early results are pointing to the Jeep Seeker effort being a huge success.

* 45,584 entries (as of this posting)

* Over 81,000 site visits

* 21.6% of the users were from our experiential, digitally savvy group (versus a normal Lottery game engagement level of 1-2% for this group)

On the Lottery Facebook page, we found comments such as:

“I love this game…Lol.  Very challenging.”

“…filled with excitement trying to hurry along to grab that Jeep.”

“This is fun even if I don’t win.”

This is great new territory for both The Virginia Lottery and Big River.   We are now fired up to develop what’s next.

Thank goodness in our inexact world – if you stick to strategic principals and execute with a passion – great results just seem to happen… 99% of the time.

Hats off to everyone who worked on this terrific JeepSeeker promotion.