The World's Largest Signpost

Nokia called for an idea that would engage people to start using their navigation service OVI maps on their mobile phones and on the web and drive sales and usage of Nokia’s N97 phones featuring navigation services.

The target audience wants to be at the centre of what’s going on. When planning their social lives, this market moves seamlessly between the digital and physical worlds: texting meeting locations, sharing and talking about great places to go. Nokia needed to demonstrate that navigation can be more than just getting from A to B, using the campaign line of “Get to the Good Things”. Navigation became “social navigation”.

The first move was to add a layer inside the actual service allowing people could pin their favourite places on a globally shared map, such as coffee shops, restaurants and hiking trails.

People were asked to pinpoint their “Good Things” and the resulting map became the base of the campaign. However, these places needed to be highlighted in real life. Nokia found an empty lot next to the south end of Tower Bridge in London, and built one of the world's largest interactive installations - A 60 tonne structure that was over 50 meters tall and was completely motorised - "The World's Biggest Signpost". People on the street could text a location to the signpost and within moments the signpost would turn and display the direction and distance to their Good Thing. The installation was streamed live onto nokia.com where users from all over the world could participate and add their favourite location by dropping a pin on the Good Things Map. After the signpost had turned and displayed your location the signpost automatically sent images of your Good Thing on the signpost and sent them back to you in an email. Every Good Thing was also pushed to its own Twitter feed.

During its live period of two weeks, thousands of “Good Things” were posted on OVI Maps from more than 80 countries and displayed on the signpost, filling every slot available. There were 10.3 m visits to the maps web page during the campaign. Service activation rates met the targets of 30% conversion.