Urban Dash was at its core an experience. We took gaming, which is traditionally a category that isolates people, and brought it to life in a way that motivated the target and created a community, but also stayed true to New Balance and spoke the brand language. Consumers that had an iPhone and either saw the Urban Dash call to action in store, on media or that interacted with our street teams, were all prompted to snap a QR code that led them to a free download of the game.

Every day for a month, multiple batons were dropped throughout the five boroughs. Baton drop locations were posted on Facebook and Twitter daily, and what we found was that players not only visited these social media pages to get location information but also to congratulate each other on impressive “steals” or thank New Balance for developing such a great game. Part of what made the game play interesting was that once a player was within 100ft of a baton they were able to take possession of it, but if another player was also within range, they could steal the baton. At the end of the day the goal was to get to the New Balance New York store with a baton in order to redeem prizes and the player to redeem the most batons at the end of game play won a solid gold baton worth $20,000. With such a sizeable prize at stake, strategies and alliances were inevitable and kept players engaged for 4 weeks. Players formed friendships with not only the store staff they would see every day but also with their competition. Results:- Over 1,000 people downloaded the iPhone application- Urban Dash video received 6MM blogger hits the 1st day it was launched- Each player averaged 22 miles and over 2 hours of game play- 300 people lined up to enter the store on opening day- Exceeded store launch traffic with over 12K+ visitors per month since Grand Opening- Over 74 MM media impressions and over 55K face to face interactions with our street teamClient Quote:“We have never played in this space from a mobile marketing perspective so it was quite unique and deemed very successful internally with senior stakeholders.” Tracey Knauer - New Balance