Digital scavenger hunt

Rebel Sports ran a ‘Home of Football’ campaign in early 2021. Although the campaign was multi-branded, Nike boots are typically the biggest draw-card for the season, and for this campaign.

As such, Nike asked Tundra to develop an engaging and interactive social campaign to strengthen their voice and boost the presence of Nike football boots during this targeted campaign. While football was top of mind, we wanted to promote Nike’s latest Mercurials, and take advantage of the captivated prospective customers.

We worked with Nike to develop the scavenger hunt. We chose to run the hunt across Instagram, as rebel have high engagement amongst their 26K followers. Nike athletes were engaged to post cryptic clues and encourage users to find the “unlock” hidden in a caption deep in our athlete’s Instagram feeds.

The ‘unlock’ was a unique sequence of emojis that connected the athlete’s clues to the hidden posts on their feeds.

The first person to find the ‘unlock’ each round, and share it with @rebelfootball won a series of prizes.

Once the ‘unlock’ was found and submitted, that round was closed, and winners were announced by rebel’s athletes.

There were three rounds in total, run over the course of a week. The prizes included rebel sport gift cards, Nike Mercurial football boots, and even a brand new football jersey for the winner of the final round.

A combination of teaser posts, cryptic clues, and longer-form athlete videos were created to encourage participation and build momentum for each round. We also ensured the posting schedule of this supporting content was flexible enough to maintain control over the level of difficulty throughout the campaign, which we could tweak as needed based on engagement and general audience sentiment.

We reviewed each athlete’s Instagram feed to identify a suitable post of theirs, buried deep in their feed, to serve as their hidden post. We needed to use old posts, so it wouldn’t be too close to the top of their feeds, and therefore too easy to find. Then we crafted clues built around the connection between Nike Mercurials and speed, to subtly point to each of our chosen hidden posts.

We then created a brief for each athlete, directing them to film themselves recording the clue, and instructing them to edit the caption of the chosen hidden post by adding a campaign ‘unlock’ (or series of emojis). The purpose of the ‘unlock’ was to clearly connect back to the campaign and give users something concrete to hunt for.

We edited the athletes’ footage into succinct clue videos for rebel to post on Instagram to kick off each round. These videos included the athlete’s clue as well as further details on the prizes up for grabs and how to enter.

We also edited the footage into congratulatory messages to post at the end of each round.

We needed to ensure the competition wasn’t too easy, so prizes wouldn’t be awarded too quickly – but also didn’t want it to be too difficult and lose momentum. Therefore we prepared multiple clues for each round, to varying degrees of difficulty to give Nike and rebel flexibility and allow them to change the pace of the campaign if users were finding the ‘unlocks’ too quickly in early rounds.

During the course of the scavenger hunt we saw user participation increase over the three rounds. The rebel social team also identified a core group of active customers who were highly engaged throughout the campaign.