The Zealios Sun-Activated Coupon is appropriate to this category for a number of reasons. For one, we had a very clear, very particular target: Performance athletes, in many cases professionals in cycling and triathlons. We had a product, Zealios sunscreen, that appealed only to athletes—it contained a great deal of zinc so that it didn’t wear off with sweat, not appealing to everyday beach goers. We had a particular location—outdoors, where the target exclusively would be when training, and where our idea would only work. Also, a particular media, or device, the mobile phone: The one thing we knew where we could reach this target seeing as they carried it on them always, especially in the location we knew they would always be—outdoors. Lastly, we used a digital coupon in order facilitate the consumer move on to actual trial and purchase upon receiving the web app.

Because performance athletes, namely professional triathletes, swore by it, we had ambassadors willing to take our web app and distribute it amongst their great many followers in social channels.

But rather than asking users to download a native app, we designed a web app that functions directly in the Firefox browser on Android devices. The user experience is simple, press the begin button to activate the sensor.

If you’re outside, you get a 50% discount on Zealios. If you’re indoors, you get nothing. The app linked directly to the Zealios ecommerce site for easy ordering upon your coupon being accepted.

1.) It was directly sent to those in their databases who had expressed interest in the past on their website or signed up to their newsletters.

2.) It was Direct Messaged to their followers on Facebook.

3.) The "ambassadors" of the brand, two triathletes in California with huge fan bases socially posted and direct mailed their followers and contacts the link to try this out.

The Sun-Activated Coupon was conceived as a tech experiment with Zealios, and it’s budget was just over $5K CAD, so our objectives were very modest: Generate awareness because of the tech and with it a 5% increase in traffic to the site and onto purchase. We exceeded this a great deal. Buzz on tech blogs like Mashable and TechCrunch resulted in a total of over 7.5 million unpaid media impressions online. Traffic to the Zealios site as a result of this and the webapp was up nearly 1000%. In a year that saw no other marketing activity, sales were up 46% overall in 2014 directly relating to the coupon. We saw over 90% growth as a result of year end and encouragingly saw a profit ahead of plan, within two years of starting out.