Company: Experian Consumer Services, Inc., Costa Mesa, CA
Entry Submitted By: Edelman
Company Description: ConsumerInfo.com, Inc. was founded in 1995 to give consumers quick, easy and inexpensive access to their credit profile. It is now the leading provider of online consumer credit reports, credit scores, credit monitoring and other credit-related information. As part of the Experian family, it continues to develop innovative products to help consumers better understand and manage their credit.
Nomination Category: Marketing Campaign Awards Categories - Specialty
Nomination Sub Category: New Product or Service Introduction of the Year

Nomination Title: freecreditscore.com Score Planner™

Tell the story of this nominated marketing campaign for the judges (up to 525 words). Describe the genesis, planning, execution, and results to date of your campaign. If applicable, remember to describe what's unique or innovative about your campaign:

Freecreditscore.com™ is one of Experian’s flagship brands that helps consumers to better understand their credit through daily credit and identity monitoring, access their credit report & score, score factors, credit education and tools, and finally, the Score Planner™.  After extensive research, including internal and external surveys, member focus groups, and usability and concept testing, it became apparent that consumers are still unclear about how credit scores are calculated and can impact a consumer’s financial well-being – this research indicated the need for the creation of the freecreditscore.com tool Score Planner.
 
The launch of the freecreditscore.com Score Planner was supported by a robust ad campaign and an interactive competition. The ad campaign was designed to give the audience an interactive preview of the tool using unique scenarios not often experienced in everyday life.  The ads featured the following:
 
• Score Planner “sliders” illustrating the impact that different actions – opening new lines of credit, changing credit limits, forgetting to pay a bill on time – have on credit scores.
• Each ad features a young couple seated on a couch, using the sliders to project different scenarios.  Eventually, the couple is confronted with a unique “mystery slider.”  
• Moving the slider results in several unexpected experiences, ranging from a private rock concert (featuring FCS talent Bret Michaels) to an unusual encounter with guacamole.

As a result of the ad campaign, viewers proactively took to FCS social media platforms to suggest adding unique “mystery” sliders to incorporate into the commercial series.  As a result of this wave of unsolicited, enthusiastic consumer feedback, freecreditscore.com launched the “Make a Better Commercial Than We Did” contest, challenging entrants to create a video or suggest a concept for an original ending to the Score Planner ad campaign.

The contest was designed to be all-inclusive by giving entrants the ability to both suggest and/or create a commercial ending through the following avenues:
 
• Video form – entrants utilize the “Make a Better Commercial Than We Did” contest homepage to submit their original videos and gain access to a variety of reactionary responses the original ad campaign actors had pre-taped.  These entries were eligible to win a $25,000 grand prize.

• Narrative form – contestants  suggest an ending in narrative form through multiple avenues including online form, email, Tweet and text message, as well as voice mail, fax and U.S. mail.  
o Those entries were judged weekly over the course of the contest, with a $2,000 prize awarded each week based on the judges’ top pick. 
o The weekly winners of written submissions had their ideas brought to life by professionals at Rhett and Link, creators of the original video series that garnered more than 5 million YouTube views.
o Depending on the method of entry, participants were eligible for additional unique prizes, reflective of the commercials’ quirky mystery slider endings. Examples included a Bret Michaels inscribed fax machine and a porcelain poodle.  
 
As a result of the Score Planner launch, the “Make a Better Commercial Than We Did” garnered the following: 

• 5,237 approved entries across both video and narrative form
• Over a million video views via paid media and YouTube
• Over 405 million digital impressions served
• Visits to the freecreditscore.com

Upload a collection of supporting files and web addresses to our server to provide more background information to the judges. You may upload any number of attachments and URLs through the "Add Attachments, Videos, or Links to This Entry" link above. (Do NOT list your URLs below.)

Provide a brief biography of the leader of the team that planned and executed this marketing campaign (up to 125 words):

Mark Hriciga is the vice president of advertising at Experian Consumer Services. Mark has over 28 years of advertising experience.  Mark is responsible for the creation and development of freecreditscore.com advertisement campaigns and supporting other Experian Consumer Services product offerings, including the freecreditreport.com® band campaign, which went on to become an American pop culture phenomenon.