During about two weeks, everywhere in the underground and in Parisian streets, advertisements in neon letters announced a new concept.
Texts such as "Le rentring, le concept que les new-yorkais nous envient" (Rentring, a concept New-Yorkers would envy us for), "Ce soir, j'ai peut-être un plan pour te faire rentrer" (Tonight I might know how to get you to my place) and "Moi ce que je préfère quand je sors c'est quand je rentre" (For me, the nice thing about partying is going home) incited people to visit the website www.lerentring.com.
Rentring is a French-English contraction of the French word "rentrer", which means going home ("rentrer chez soi" = going home).
Until November 14th the website only showed some short movies which explained the new concept ... one of them showed a disco which was completely empty: "nowadays, people love going home", another one showed a band (The Stroops) which was disappointed about all fans going home during their first song at their last concert (they therefore decided to only write songs which would last only 5 seconds maximum) while other movies showed other examples of people who adopted the rentring. Of course visitors were able to send these movies to friends by e-mail and to download other goodies around rentring from the web site.
Since November 14th, the advertisements and the web site show the revelation of this mysterious viral campaign: the option net et mobile by Orange. This is an option of the mobile subscription from Orange which allows its customers to have a 8 Mbit ADSL connection without the need to have a fixed line, together with 30 TV channels, access to a video on demand service (VoD) and unlimited calls to mobile Orange numbers each night after 9PM for € 39,90 a month.
The option is currently limited to the area around Paris (Ile-de-France), but will be extended to the rest of France in the first quarter of 2007. It is however restricted to 20.000 customers.
For readers who haven't understood this yet: the idea behind the "rentring" concept is that people who have subscribed to this option will prefer going home to use their Internet connection and handle their social life completely by Internet and their unlimited calls :-).
Analysis of this campaign
The idea behind the campaign is quite funny, but I think some things could have been better ... For example, the teasing period only lasted for about 2 weeks which meant that many people decided to visit the website only once the offer behind the campaign was already revealed (2 weeks is quite short to get people interested in "something new"). Therefore, the viral effect of the campaign has probably remained rather limited, since people probably see the movies more as commercials than as something funny after having seen the revelation.
The web site and less explicitly the commercials used the colours and the look&feel of Orange, which means that - based on the indications in the movies, but also based on the information which could be found in the source code of the website which among others contained Orange in the keywords - the link with Orange was quite easy to make even before the revelation. The web site could have used the blue background colour of the commercials as a main colour until the 14th ... the link with Orange would then have been much less obvious to make. From November 14th the black colour could have replaced this blue colour ...
The texts on the commercials were quite teasing, which was of course important to get people to visit the web site. Since they didn't really contain any indications about the revelation of the campaign people who had become interested could only go and visit the web site ...
As a conclusion I think the idea behind the campaign was quite good, but the way it was done was probably not the best one. This means the result of the campaign might remain rather limited ... or not, since people do talk about it (especially on the Internet), so that's at least a good start ;-) door Thomas Vergouwen
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2 comments | 1077 views
this publication is published in: Marketing
by Stuart over 
by Kiera over 
by Pierre LACOUE over
Si tu n'as pas peur de faire du glanding, tu peux faire du telecommuting ou "resting a la maison" et du coup meme pas besoin de faire du rentring. C'est la prochaine tendance!
Trop fort ce Romain ... toujours une tendance à l'avance ;-)