In 2011 ERGO Direkt, the leading online insurer in Germany, introduced the "Item Insurance". This world-first insurance policy allowed customers to protect individual items, without having to opt for an expensive property insurance.

An innovative insurance policy deserves an equally innovative way of being advertised. Thus, we invented a story about the mysterious Carpathian Hamsters – a name widely used in Germany for Romanian online defrauders. The main character in this story was fictitious film maker Hannes Mossolf, who discovers the intelligent species, and makes a documentary film about their exceptional behaviour and sudden disappearance. A trailer to this documentary was seeded on the internet, with a call to support Hannes' quest on facebook. At the same time we posted clues all over internet, starting a virtual scavenger hunt which finally led to the discovery of the Hamsters in a TV commercial for the ERGO Direkt "Item Insurance".

The campaign was a huge success for ERGO Direkt. The Facebook page of the hamsters had more than 13,000 fans after a few weeks with a very high interaction rate of 75%, the videos of Hannes Mossolf had 320,000 views and the whole digital campaign had more than 116m impressions, leading to 33% more insurance closures than originally projected.