Serving Up the Machine
August 27th, 2010
Rob Tonkin is an executive producer at Marketing Factory, Inc.
Over the Memorial Day weekend I worked at the Sasquatch! Music Festival in George, Washington, performing on-site marketing work for Honda. During the event, I met the folks from Esurance. I was familiar with the company, thanks to their clever television commercials. Shortly after the festival, Marketing Factory was invited to devise some of our patented “experience marketing” — which we’ve furnished to our clients for 11 years — to assist Esurance with their on-site sponsorship of the 2010 US Open.
We repaired to our creative think tank and emerged with one idea in particular that interested everyone involved: an Esurance Rube Goldberg Machine.
Rube who, you ask? This cartoonist, engineer, and inventor is famous for his devices that perform simple tasks in really complicated ways. By the time he passed away in 1970, Rube Goldberg’s machines had become a staple of popular culture, and his name an adjective in Webster’s dictionary.
Given Esurance’s innovative technology and 24/7 customer service, we felt that some kind of human interaction using technology and engineering would be the perfect way to engage US Open attendees. And, given the venue, we determined that a tennis ball and racquet should figure prominently in the apparatus. The idea was to show consumers that the company provides the best of both worlds: People when you want them, technology when you don’t.TM
The end result is “a day in the life of a tennis ball.”
The ball begins its day at home, travels out the creaky front door and down a daunting coffee cup. After the caffeine is absorbed, it rolls out of the bottom of the cup, moving toward the Metro station. (After all, it’s an eco-conscious tennis ball since it represents the car insurance company’s keen environmental stance.) It then rolls onto a spinning car tire that’s also an Esurance 24/7 clock. The clock/tire spins and drops the caffeinated ball onto a spiral tower. It then descends to an outdoor elevator, which lifts it up the side of the Esurance office tower.
When our intrepid hero reaches the top of Esurance’s headquarters, it’s launched into an auto body shop setting where it triggers an ad featuring one of the company’s technological innovations, online repair monitoring. Next, as the ball rolls through an office scene, a commercial spotlighting an Esurance coverage counselor helping a customer begins to play. Later, the ball stops at a café to meet friends on its way to the Metro station, where it hops on a train that brings it home at the end of its very busy day.
Visitors to the Esurance booth in the South Plaza will surely be surprised and delighted as they push the big red button to start the whole day over again for our soon-to-be-famous tennis ball.
This probably goes without saying, but if you plan to attend this year’s US Open, I highly recommend stopping by the Esurance booth!
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