Tour Du Sofa
- Brand
- IKEA
- Year
- 2012
- Objective
- Engagement
- Industry
- Retail
- Mechanic
- Racing & Sports
- Platform
- App
- Agency
- ACHTUNG!
Objective
Škoda had backed the Tour de France since 2004 with 300 support cars and jersey sponsorship, yet stayed a passive presence in the broadcast. With RTL Nederland, the brand wanted to pull viewers off the couch and into the race itself, turning each stage into a reason to keep the second screen open.
Solution
You open the Tour du Sofa app (or the site) on your iPad as the stage starts, pick whether you're racing your Facebook friends or the whole country, and start predicting: who takes the intermediate sprint, what happens on the climb, who wins the stage. When something actually happens on the road — a crash, a cow wandering onto the tarmac, a rider's mechanical — it pops up in the game in real time, and you score points for calling it fast. Between bets, trivia questions and quick bonus mini-games keep you occupied, with an animated peloton riding past in the names and team colours you've picked. Your points feed a running leaderboard, and the week's top players get pulled into the RTL4 studio to play live on Tour du Jour for a ride in the team car — with a Škoda Citigo as the grand prize.
Results
290,000 site visitors, with 12,000 downloading and actively playing the app; average session length ran 1.5 hours straight through a stage. In the first week alone, over 20,000 players averaged an hour per stage on predictions and trivia, and the game collected more than 50,000 stage-winner predictions over the Tour, 15% of them correct. 90% of players rated the game easy to pick up and not boring, and 60% said they'd play again the following year.
- 1
Viewers create a profile at www.tourdusofa.nl or download the Tour du Sofa app to play alongside the live television broadcast of a Tour de France stage, mainly on a tablet next to the TV.
- 2
Before the stage starts, the player chooses to compete against Facebook friends or against the whole country, with points feeding a personal ranking (eigen klassement).
- 3
As the stage unfolds, the player locks in predictions ahead of each real event: who wins the intermediate sprint, what happens on the day's mountain climbs, and who takes the stage overall, scoring points when the picks come true.
- 4
When something unscripted happens in the actual race — a crash, cows on the road, a mechanical failure — the same event pops up on screen in real time and the player scores by reacting to it as fast as possible.
- 5
Between race moments, the game quizzes the player on tour trivia and rider knowledge, with correct answers adding to the score.
- 6
The player also earns points through mini-games, whose animations show riders wearing the names and team colors the player picked in their predictions.
- 7
Points accumulate into the player's personal ranking, showing where they stand against friends or the country after each stage, with the standings carrying forward as new stages are played.
- 8
Each week's top online players are invited into the studio of RTL4's daily show Tour du Jour to compete live for a VIP ride in one of the tour's follow cars, with a Škoda Citigo as the campaign's grand prize.
