FedEx challenged us to create a marketing program that would not only celebrate its PGA golf sponsorship, but also educate our target market on FedEx’s international shipping capabilities.Many of the target consumers were avid golf fans, who appreciated FedEx’s humorous golf commercials from past years. So our challenge was to incorporate more of a business message without sacrificing the office insights and humour that have made FedEx advertising so successful.

Our solution: to launch The FedExCup Global Golf Sweepstakes—with the grand prize of a golf vacation. This allowed us to create streamlined, humorous advertising that simply had to entice golf fans to go online and enter. There, we could educate them on FedEx’s international shipping capabilities.'The leaderboard' was the campaign’s common thread. In each execution, we featured a golf-style leaderboard or scorecard, and show how it could be used to rank coworkers to select consumers’ potential trip-mates.

Using television, print and online advertising, we communicated the basics of the sweepstakes in a way that maintained the humor, simplicity and office insight that has made FedEx advertising so successful for decades.

All the advertising drove consumers to fedexcup.com, where they entered the sweepstakes by answering daily trivia questions that tested their golf and business knowledge. The experience included calls-to-action to learn more about FedEx international shipping, thus achieving our primary business objective.

In total, the sweepstakes received over 550,000 entries—almost 800% above our goal. Additionally, 10.5% of all registrants opted in to receive additional communications from FedEx—an exceptionally high rate for a broad audience.By any measure, it was considered the most successful sweepstakes in FedEx history.