Laptop Hunter Hits the Streets for Microsoft

This week, Microsoft's Laptop Hunter has hit the streets of Sydney and Melbourne giving away $1300 laptop shopping sprees. The premise was simple - You find it, you keep it.




To break the consumer perception that you have to spend thousands to get a decent laptop, we developed the Laptop Hunter campaign to let ordinary people learn for themselves the fact that there's a whole range of great laptops available at a heap of different retailers for less than $1300.

Each morning, listeners tuned in to Nova FM to hear clues as to the whereabouts of the mystery man Laptop Hunter or visited Nova's website for the clues. Punters then had to deduce the correct location, approach everyone they saw, and say "I can buy a great laptop for less than $1300". If they said it to our hidden man, he'd put them to that challenge by handing over the cash and taking them shopping.

We followed our winning shopper around town as they hunted down their brand new laptop for less than $1300. If they found it, they kept it. Plus the change.

Where they went, what they bought and how good a deal they got was all entirely up to them. As you can see in the videos (one posted above, the rest can be found on www.nova969.com.au), there's a big range, and everybody has different tastes and criteria in choosing the perfect laptop for their needs.

The campaign idea came from a US TV commercial for Microsoft in which a girl buys a laptop. However, for the Aussie market, we wanted to get radio and online exposure, viral word-of-mouth activity on the streets, an exciting "anyone can win" frenzy in public places, and our shoppers to be a mixed bag of random ordinary people plucked off the street. The bulk of the campaign was in the lap of the gods and could have gone in any direction because we didn't have any control over where the winner went, what they did, said and bought.

Next week, the Laptop Hunter heads to sunny Brisbane to create a stir there and give away $1300 laptop shopping sprees to Queenslanders.