The Guardian Memory Test

Insight

When the New Year arrives, resolutions fly around like fireworks. But as we all know, few of them last much longer. That’s why The Guardian wanted to give its readership a little more support in 2012 with a marketing campaign called Head Start.

Each week during January, The Guardian provided a new way to for their readers to improve themselves from Think Yourself Fit to Memory Week to Good Mood Food to Making More Time. This ran in conjunction with a “This is my year to…” video campaign that got people talking about what they wanted to achieve in the year ahead.

Challenge

In addition to running a media campaign to raise awareness, Doco was asked to help support Memory Week by building an Online Memory Test compatible with the desktop, mobile and tablets. The questions and scoring were formulated by the University of Cambridge.

Deliverables

A Memory Test Application and a media campaign.

Results

The University of Cambridge needed 1,000 completed tests to form conclusions for their study researching long term memory. Our app achieved that target in the first day of launch! By the close of the live date, we had had over 80,000 visits and 32,000 test completions (that’s a 39.3% completion rate). The test takes 12-15 minutes to complete, which adds up to 386,436 hours (or 16,101 days, or 309 weeks) of brand engagement.

Meanwhile, the Twitter hashtag #memorystudy was a huge hit, even getting a mention from the team at BBC’s QI no less!