Pushbutton pulled off an industry first by shooting high quality video scenes to provide interactive assets for a Guinness ‘red button’ TV commercial. The project formed part of the popular ‘Fridge Man’ campaign to drive sales of Guinness draught in a can.

For Pushbutton, creating an interactive TV commercial that would launch from a call to action broadcast on top of a lovingly crafted Guinness TV advertisement by AMV BBDO was both an honour and a challenge. Guinness TV advertising is just about as good as TV advertising gets, with numerous industry gongs to its name.

Pushbutton set out to do two things; one, to make the transition from linear TV ad to the interactive as seamless as possible for the user, and secondly to match the production values of the linear ad in the interactive.

James Cumberbatch, Director of Interactive at Pushbutton, explains “We have always believed that red button ads frequently short change iconic brands with inferior production values to the linear TV ads that they launch from. Winning the Guinness gig, enabled us to test a better way of doing things. By commissioning and filming dedicated interactive assets, using the same ‘Fridge Man’ actor, and a similar set, we were able to assemble the pieces we needed to build an interactive advertisement good enough to carry the Guinness name.”

For the user, this meant that when they went into the interactive section of the ad, the ‘Fridge Man’ character who was so popular in the main TV ad, was there to greet them when the interactive launched, and was there to guide them through its feature-rich set of interactive opportunities.

Pushbutton’s ‘Fridge Man’ interactive won both critical and commercial plaudits. In an independent review of the ‘red button’ ad New Media Age wrote “It’s also reassuring to see that Guinness’s interactive TV foray gracefully avoids the medium’s many pitfalls to deliver a seamless televisual experience that looks and feels as if it was meant to be. There’s an odd little man in the fridge in the broadcast ad, and there’s a perfect Guinness waiting for you at home with his help behind the red button.”

Decipher’s Rupert Brittain analysed the Sky View data on the performance of the ad and noted “statistics for total household interactions are generally positive. When analysed in the context of the target market (ABC1 men), the Guinness ad’s response rate was as high as 1.16%… The figures for the campaign’s coverage and frequency also show that an above-average number of people revisited the site: 12.1% as opposed to 8.1%. All the content within the i-ad was apparently a good incentive to return. This trend is corroborated by the session length figures: the average for the Guinness ad was 1 minute 9 seconds, longer than the typical campaign.”

Pushbutton Managing Director, Paula Byrne, said “In many, many ways our Guinness interactive TV commercial was ahead of its time, and still represents possibly the best example you can find of ’spot on’ interactive TV advertising around an iconic brand. New technologies now offer the possibility of seeing more iAds of this quality and Pushbutton is ready and able, as always, to take things to the next level.”

Release date: November 22, 2006