Accident Avenue for Confused.com

Cake was tasked with raising Confused.com’s brand profile and products outside of personal finance news pages and websites – both on and offline, in traditional and social media. The main aim of the project was to raise brand awareness through PR and social media, while also driving traffic to Confused.com. Cake focused on finding an engaging story behind the site’s products that would capitalise upon the combined power of real world experience with online content and social sharing. Making use of the data available from Confused.com, Cake identified the most accident-prone street in the UK, through the site’s statistics on car insurance claims. 

Once the street was identified, Cake’s live events team set to work bubble-wrapping the entire road. Cake worked closely with a specialist bubble wrap supplier to ensure not only that was the bubble wrap used entirely biodegradable, but that poststunt, a suitable use for the materials could be found. In fact, all bubble wrap used in the event was then donated to Oxfam, who used it to send aid to earthquake-hit Haiti. With the logistics in place, Cake created a strong integrated on and offline media plan to make the stunt famous. The stunt was unveiled first online – exclusive shots of the street were posted on Twitter, Flickr and Facebook. Buzz was built up online with conversations through the various social media outlets. This helped fuel the offline sell in – when the team came to speak to news and picture editors, a fair few were already aware of the activity through the online buzz as a result, over £780,000 of coverage was achieved, 119 pieces of online blog posts and articles with a combined reach of 125,298,800, over 1,200 click-throughs to the images on Flickr in first 7 hours, 110 uses of #accidentavenue and over 200 tweets about the story leading to approximately 95,048 impressions on twitter in the first 7 hours. The @confused_com following also increased nearly 20% (18.8%) on the first day of the stunt. More importantly, Confused.com saw a 6.5% uplift in traffic to the site on the day of the stunt with 4,000 additional quotes made through the site.

Summary 

The simple yet effective nature of the stunt, combined with first-rate on and offline media relations meant widespread coverage both in the UK and further afield for Confused.com. With a tangible business result of the generation of 4,000 extra insurance quotes and an overall campaign ROI of 60:1, Accident Avenue far surpassed all expectations and objectives.

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