State Farm Creates Personalized Chaos to Promote Insurance

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You're probably not expecting a giant robot to lay waste to your neighborhood tomorrow. But, if it does, State Farm is there for you.

That's the message behind a new digital plaything that's part microsite and part app, created by DDB Chicago and BReel for State Farm.

The landing page for the site, Chaos in Your Town, asks for your street address and then uses Google Street View to create a scene of robotic destruction on your own block. After watching the customized video, you can share the link via social media or get a list of insurance agents near you

"We were getting a lot of traction with our "State of Chaos" commercial and wanted to extend that by letting people get involved in a fun way in a different medium," says Brent Bynum, marketing manager- social media for State Farm. Another goal was to position the 89-year-old brand as creative and technologically up-to-date.

A week before the launch of the application, State Farm seeded interest with an MSNBC page takeover that mirrored other rich-media digital buys that show the robot coming out of the display unit and rampaging across the page.

The link to the microsite on Facebook is "fan-gated:" Visitors have to like the page before they can use the application. To promote use and sharing, State Farm bought ads on Facebook and other digital media.

Bynum says, "Most of our users so far have come from Facebook. Facebook is probably the most fluid network right now, things move through there quickly."

The insurance giant will measure the campaign's success by traffic to the microsite and number of shares. A week in, the application had 125,000 users, which Bynum said was a great start at getting out the core message: "State Farm helps people recover from the unexpected."