Techie the Series

In the summer of 2018, Dutch supermarket chain Albert Heijn taught the ‘skills of the future’ to children with their Tech-is-awesome loyalty program. To introduce this to their target audience, we came up with a unique concept: a scripted YouTube series that brought the loyalty program to life and made a hero out of the robot Techie, the face of the campaign.

During the summer of 2018 Albert Heijn had a loyalty program where with every €10 spent, you would receive stickers based on tech revolving around the hero Techie. The wish of Albert Heijn was to really bring the campaign to life for the target audience so that the children would collect all the Techie stickers. During the campaign period, anyone who did their groceries at Albert Heijn could collect the stickers, which could then be scanned on their smartphone to let Techie do all kinds of tricks using AR. The ultimate goal of the campaign was to let children become familiar with science, technology, computational thinking and programming. The big question was however; how do you ensure that the target group downloads the app and interacts with the Techie stickers? This question kicked off our concepting phase.

There is no other medium that is used as much as YouTube by children. This is the platform where they can watch their biggest heroes and spend the most time for the purpose of entertainment. This insight resulted in the final concept which served as a starting point for the successful campaign of Techie The Series.

Techie The Series tells the story of four brave teens who join forces with Techie to fight their enemy. This trilogy became the first high-quality fictional series on YouTube in the Netherlands. The main characters were portrayed by famous Dutch YouTubers: Hanwe, Bibi en Gio, also known as big heroes of Dutch teenagers.

Omar, Creative Director at Maak: “What I really liked was that we could see that a series with a high production value and such a storyline worked well for the young target group in the Netherlands. We observed that there was an unmistakable need for content like this. The numbers confirmed that we had the correct feeling about this since this app was used significantly more than previous apps. It was also really cool to see that partly due to our contribution to the campaign resulted in an increase of imagination and inspiration of what they could do with Techie among the children.

Along with the series, there have been multiple posts on social media to promote the series and the app in a cross-media way. The results were a reach of more than 1 million people and 5 million minutes of watching time on YouTube. Apart from the incredible reach that was generated with the series, the comments were more than positive. In addition, the series was trending on YouTube for three weeks, the second episode even reached number 2 in trending. This means that the video was rated above average and spoke to a lot of different users.