State Farm Brings Back 'Chaos in Your Town' -- This Time, on Mobile

A couple of years ago, State Farm introduced you to "Chaos in Your Town," a website that let you plug in your home address and witness a robot wreaking havoc on your neighborhood. Now, DDB Chicago and the insurance giant present the second iteration of the campaign -- except this time, it's mobile. The mobile iAd uses the GPS capabilities of your smart phone, replacing the manual address input requirement from 2011. The result is a movie featuring that robot going on a rampage in your current location. As the ad progresses, it lets you decide how you should respond to the damage: perhaps by getting in touch with State Farm. Joe Cianciotto, Executive Creative Director of DDB, said the agency wanted to make sure they were upping the bar in terms of innovation -- and also help the brand it was advertising turn engagement with the ad into actual business leads. The original "Chaos" film generation four million user-generated films -- that stat told the agency that audiences would be happy to have more content. What makes this special, according to Mr. Cianciotto, is that usually, geo-targetting capabilities rely on how powerful your device is, which is why they take the form of native apps. While WebGL would have been the next-best thing, that would mean the user could only view the experience in the iAd itself, and not share it. So the agency used HTML5 emerging tech, that included Canvas and CSS 3D transforms. The ad also accounts for the fact that many viewers stream the experience over slow networks. One of the challenges was to drive users to call State Farm and get a quote that didn't feel forced -- so the agency added some interactivity to that part of the ad, where you're asked how you want to respond to the robot.

State Farm Brings Back 'Chaos in Your Town' -- This Time, on Mobile

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