Fan the Flame and drive off in a brand new Mini

Car manufacturer Mini asked agency.com (TBWA) to design a promotional eye catcher for the annual Motor Show in Brussels. The creative people at agency.com came up with an original idea for an interactive social media campaign: position a Mini Countryman on the slope of a ramp, face down. Secure the car with a rope. Place a bunsen burner underneath the rope. Send a live feed of the setup to the Mini Facebook fanpage, and let visitors have a shot of fire to burn that rope. When it snaps, you drive off with the car.

Agency.com contacted Rambla to help them overcome the technical challenges it was facing when implementing the concept. After setting up a Wowza powered dedicated media server, a Rambla developer joined the technical team at agency.com to assist them in building a custom Wowza module that would manage the player's queue (which is quite complex in itself, as people who are waiting in line for their turn can challenge higher ranked fellow players to better their own ranking) on the one hand, and the chip card that ignites the actual flame on the other.

The setup at the Expo grounds entails two Sony BRC-700 series camera's in all-weather housings, a joystick to control the camera's position and angle, and our own custom built media encoder. The flame is captured in close-up, and displayed as an inset in a wider overview shot, to be broadcasted as one single live stream. On the server side, a low-latency streaming application minimizes the delay between the player's push on the button and the actual ignition of the burner.

Play while you still can, as the car is dangling on a pretty thin rope by now!

UPDATE: after almost 30.000 burns, the rope snapped on Sunday morning 22 January. Congrats to Ilse Verhaert, who is now the lucky owner of the Mini!