BMW — Advent calendar

BMW run an advent calendar in Norway through December. A question a day, three answers to choose from, and if you get it right you can register to win. The prize changed from year to year. The one I worked on, as I remember it, was the use of a car for a few months, which is effectively a free lease.

We have in-house creatives at Cavai and they made it look the way it looks. My part was underneath that.

The campaign had run before I joined, and the way they'd been doing it was this: a designer in Singapore logged in every night at midnight Norwegian time and changed the question by hand. Twenty-four nights of that. It worked, but it's a ridiculous thing to ask of a person, and it only takes one missed night for the whole thing to be wrong.

So the job was to take the person out of it. The creative carries all the questions and works out for itself which day it is, so the right one is there without anybody touching it. Once that was in place the campaign ran itself for the month.

It isn't complicated engineering. It's just very obviously worth doing once you've watched someone do it manually at midnight.

I didn't design this one. That was our in-house creative team at Cavai. My work was the automation behind it, making the daily rotation happen on its own.

It ran on Aller and Startsiden and pulled just over 10 million impressions, with an interaction rate of 0.29%. Around 15,000 people answered a question, and 6,777 of them went on to register for the prize.

Nobody had to stay up until midnight.