Zealios sunscreen is made for endurance athletes. It’s sweat-proof and won’t sting your eyes as you sweat. So athletes who used Zealios sunscreen, raved about it. In addition to having no marketing whatsoever, and being quite expensive, very few athletes had given it a try.

To get people past the sticker shock of Zealios sunscreen, a coupon seemed like a pretty obvious answer. But how do you get a coupon in the hands of athletes who spend most of their waking hours training outside?

Herein we were able to find a place where we could create news about the product. We knew athletes were tech-savvy. And they were never far from their mobile devices. So a technological solution that utilized their mobile phones and the outdoors they loved so much was decided upon.

We created a coupon that only works outside: the world’s first Sun-Activated Digital Coupon. The coupon uses a smartphone’s ambient light sensor—the one that normally adjusts your screen brightness. We repurposed it to detect natural light levels and determine if you’re inside or out.

If you’re outside, you get 50% off Zealios sunscreen. If you’re inside, you get nothing.

Despite spending nothing to promote it, our Sun-Activated Coupon received over 7.5 Million Media impressions across some of the biggest industry and tech blogs. It increased web traffic 1000%. Expanded overall sales 46%, web sales 90%. And ensured that athletes who needed Zealios sunscreen most, got it. And all of it on a limited budget—only $5K

Our idea was to put a coupon on their devices, the world’s first sun-activated coupon in the form of a web app.

This coupon was able to read the user’s location, indoors or outdoors, through the repurposing of the phone’s ambient light sensor, normally used for adjusting screen brightness.

We had a great deal of sponsored athletes and lovers of the product who distributed our web app and teaser film amongst their great many followers in social channels or directly to their friends in the month long campaign.

But rather than downloading a native app, we designed a web app that functions directly Firefox browsers on Android devices.

What made it gratifying to the athlete who received it was if they were outside, they get a 50% discount on Zealios. If indoors, nothing. The app linked directly to the Zealios ecommerce site for easy ordering upon your coupon being accepted.

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.

Output Awareness:

Attention earned on tech blogs like Mashable and TechCrunch resulted in a total of over 7.5 million unpaid media impressions online.

Action/Business Impact:

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.