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Balance Fixed Costs and Flexibility by Leveraging our Expertise while Planning Your Campaign

As you're probably well aware, there are still lots of senior executives out there who don't understand what it takes to launch and manage a successful web-based campaign. The ignorant assume unlimited traffic is miraculously allocated by the magic of the Internet. The (more dangerously) informed among them might say "Can't we just add a few more servers if it turns out we need them?"

But preparing for an online campaign isn't easy or inexpensive, especially if you envision it as a short-term, "bursty" event. And the risk factor is very high. Over-allocate resources and the cost of the campaign goes through the roof. Under-allocate and you miss sales opportunities and make the Company look foolish. Loading the right number of servers, allocating bandwidth, testing applications and stressing the system needs to be thought through, especially when you're dealing in a time-constrained environment.

GSI has launched some of the biggest, highest profile web-based promotions to date, handling the entire process.

Burger King’s "Simpsonize Me" Campaign
GSI handled the traffic to the site as well as the extensive application processing behind the biggest online promotion of 2007, Burger King's simpsonizeme.com. Over 40 million visitors uploaded pictures from their own computers to GSI's systems and within seconds received a download of their image converted to a Simpsons-style picture. Based on the long-running TV comedy series and timed to coincide with the release of the Simpsons movie, Burger King launched an intensive push to “Turn the World Yellow.” The launch of this site was one of the most rapid examples of “scale up” in campaign hosting history. With 40 million visitor images being received in the first 20 days of the site’s release, critical technology resources like rendering servers, web servers, database clusters and storage arrays were required. GSI collaborated with the developers to ensure that the applications were operating at peak efficiency throughout the campaign.

Wal-Mart’s Public Relations Site
Bernstein-Rein collaborated with GSI on the first public relations site rolled out by the world's largest retailer, Wal-Mart. This PR site manages and publishes the facts about the company for the press, their customers, employees, vendors and other interested parties. On launch day the site was publicized with full page paid ads in 120 top US newspapers, online, and on television. The initial traffic surge was over 1,000,000 hits and 250,000 visitors per hour. Today, the site receives large bursts of traffic at unexpected times, on those occasions when the media broadcasts stories of interest groups attacking Wal-Mart policies. The site has never experienced an outage as a result of a burst of activity.

GEICO’s Caveman
When GEICO decided that their popular Caveman character was moving his bachelor pad online, they turned to GSI to ensure that the massive bandwidth and scalability needs could be met. CavemansCrib.com and other spinoff sites have garnered huge attention from both online and traditional media, and helped solidify additional media exposure for GEICO via a TV Series, NASCAR sponsorship and further brand recognition.

Burger King’s Subservient Chicken
Considered one of the seminal events in viral marketing, GSI collaborated with Burger King and their agency, Crispin Porter + Bogusky, to host subservientchicken.com, promoting Burger King’s line of chicken sandwiches. The site amazed the world with it’s incredible following and growth. When the site received its first traffic spikes from the newly born blogosphere, CPB and BK realized immediately that they needed an ultra-responsive, hyper-scalable partner to ensure success over the duration of the campaign. In less than 1 day, GSI had deployed a cluster of managed web servers, database servers, and firewalls, along with an “all you can eat” bandwidth configuration. GSI’s quick response and scalable architecture ensured that the campaign momentum never slowed and helped establish the legend of the subservientchicken.com site.

GSI has hosted literally hundreds of campaign driven sites for numerous major agencies and national/international brands. Agency clients include:

• Leo Burnett
• Saatchi & Saatchi North America
• WPP
• Crispin Porter + Bogusky
• FirstBorn Multimedia
• Bernstein-Rein
• VML
• Wunderman
• Tractiv
• Agency.com
• Two West
• Digit
• Beam Interactive
• Digital Evolution Group
• Domani Studios
• Adknowledge
• Rockfish Interactive

The key to a successful campaign is the consultation that takes place between GSI and our clients. What trade-offs in up-front costs, variable costs, response rates, simultaneous transactions, etc. do you want to make? Call us now and let's start planning when there are lots of options instead of waiting until the last minute, when the options become more limited.