May the Force Be with Your Desktop

Firefox and Opera compatible

Client: The History Channel
Creative Agency: ElectricArtists, Inc.

ElectricArtists began a 10-week intensive online marketing campaign for "Star Wars The Legacy Revealed" by first reaching out to the core "Star Wars" community online. During the ideation and strategy phase we conducted a series of "culture checks" with key groups of "Star Wars" fans to gauge and better understand what they would find most interesting, different and, ultimately, most compelling. The common theme we heard from them was, "It'll be hard to tell us something we don't already know or show us something we haven't seen." Thus our challenge was in finding new and unique ways of engaging a very passionate and vocal fan community.

With a fanbase as dedicated and active as "Star Wars" fans, the concept of creating a widget that fans could place on their desktops or personal pages to show their passion for "Star Wars" and, at the same time, support the History Channel campaign, was a natural fit.

For a month prior to the airing, ElectricArtists began offering exclusive online digital content as well as the Countdown Widget that incorporated key art images and an informational feed to targeted sites, including the largest online "Star Wars" fan community, TheForce.net. This early outreach produced a massive amount of online discussion, excitement and awareness well before the premiere.

The distribution of the Countdown Widget landed a 2-day featured placement on the official Apple Widget page. In addition, the campaign was supported by interviews with the producers, editorial features, a massive online video campaign, exclusive content such as buddy icons and wallpapers, and site-specific contests and a national radio sweepstakes across the Clear Channel network.

THC's "Special Presentation: Star Wars: The Legacy Revealed" achieved 1.8 million A25-54 impressions (2.5 million GAA imps), 1.1 million M25-54 impressions (1.6 million GAA imps), 1.7 million A18-49 impressions (2.3 million GAA imps) and a 2.2 AA% from 9-10 pm. When it aired it became the #1 ranked show ever for the network among A18-49 impressions and the # 1 original program among A25-54 impressions.
--  Howie Kleinberg, SVP, and Terry Goldman, senior account executive, ElectricArtists, Inc.

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Everywhere I turn I see widgets, widgets and more widgets. eBay widgets, Amazon widgets, LinkedIn widgets, drink mixing widgets…when historians look back at the 21st century, they may well refer to this as the golden age of widgets. So it should come as no surprise that the History Channel created a "Star Wars: The Legacy Revealed" countdown widget to promote the show's premier.

This widget is fun, albeit very simple application. It counts down the days until the premier while offering some morphing sketches of classic History Channel imagery turning into Star Wars icons. Beneath the images is a scrolling text bar displaying both historical and "Star Wars" facts. The History Channel has made it very easy for anyone to host the widget on their site. Just copy and paste a few lines of code (which can be found in the widget itself for added viral action) and you too can show the world how much you love "Star Wars" and The History Channel. It's a brilliant idea. Rather than pay to run an ad, offer a widget that people will post on their sites for free.

The only problem is that this widget doesn't offer much incentive for someone to run this on their site. It feels very much like an ad, a well done ad, but an ad nonetheless. It doesn't offer tons of sizzle in terms of information or interaction. So if it's not offering much value to a site owner why would they agree to run it for free?
-- Patrick Barrett, senior user interaction designer, Bazaarvoice

On the one hand, embedding this very cool widget on your MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, Blog, vlog and personal homepage tells the world that despite the freedom granted by the memorial holiday, you were sitting on your couch, perched atop a Bantha made of pillows, dressed as one of the Sand People.

On the other hand, it tells the world you're a huge "Star Wars" dork.

Either way… it shows that the History Channel and ElectricArtists knew their target market pretty darn well. You don't need to be a protocol druid, fluent in over 6 million forms of communication to recognize how cool the evolution of many of the "Star Wars" iconography is, and the countdown is a useful reminder of when to tune in. Typically I'd pan the auto sound, but since this is a widget, meant to be placed by a user with an understanding of what his or her (but most likely his) audience, on their own site, I have no qualms over the Vader intro.

As the old adage suggests, "Any widget that opens with the sound of a lightsaber is deserving of praise," so to the creators, well done on this unit…and may the something-something be with something.
-- Bradley Werner, director of marketing, The Fifth Network