For those of you familiar with DemoCamp, CaseCamp may be the polar position with its flashy power point presentations and marketing case studies. For anyone interest in online or interactive campaigns its a great event to see what works and what doesn’t. CaseCamp Toronto at The Fifth Club Wednesday nigth after a summer break and several other CaseCamps around the Canada ( Montreal & Vancouver ). I enjoy CaseCamp because it lets me see how online marketing campaigns are evolving. This months cases included:

1. The Greatest Escapes Viral Campaign by Sulemaan Ahmed from SearsTravel Sulemaan presented a case study about the Sear’s Travel division. I didn’t even know that Sears had a Travel division and the campaign’s goal was to increase aware and let customers know that Sears was willing to be competitive on price with other discount travel providers. The case centered on alot of differences between the first phase and the second phase which allowed for improvements in the overall user experience. I think it would have been good to see the campaign contest live as the power point slides were quite dull. Overall the case centered around user improvements to achieve its goal and the success of the second phase vs first.
2. Branding Botswana by Malcolm Allen from Placebrands Malcom definitely wins the award for the most innovation presentation. His presentation involved no power points or even computers. He ask the audience to close their eyes and them took them through a visualization exercise on visiting Botswana. The presentation was very cool but the content was kind of lacking and Malcom didn’t seem to have a clear goal for the branding project. I suspect its fairly early on the Botswana branding project and he’s still trying to develop a goal himself. It might have been more interesting to review the case for Amsterdam and its results.
3. Aeroplan Activation Sequence by Ian Giles from ThinData
   
   The Aeroplan case involved the new user activation process and how users interact with it through their email. Ian provided some before and after samples of the email activation and how the emails were improved to achieve Aeroplan’s goals. Overall Aeroplan’s goal seemed to be get the user to use their Aeroplan number as soon as possible. The adjusted email focused on bringing the users temporary electronic card forward up higher in the message and reducing some of the graphic placements.
4. Family Guy vs. American Dad by Ryan Ginsberg from Fuel Industries Fuel really stole the show in terms of interactive presentations. Ryan did a great job of presenting the campaigns goals and integrating into his presentation. He was even able to play the game during his presentation which was great. He presented the traffic to the campaign’s mini-site and other online metrics. He was not able to present the conversion rate to sales as this was controlled by Fox. Overall a great case and I hope others will be able to present the actual interactive matrial like this again.

After the success of Fuel’s presentation, I think the format of Casecamp should be amended to show the actual interactive campaign. I thought the same after the first Casecamp in which Royal Bank did an interactive campaign and didn’t show the actually interactive until after their presentation was completed. I’m looking forward to future CaseCamps with more interactive presentations.