Norwegian Air: Best Free Shipping on Earth

Dubbed “the best free shipping sale on Earth,” Norwegian Air’s five-day Flash Sale campaign set out to disrupt the traditional “flash sale” idea. Typically, flash sales entice users to buy things at heavily reduced prices within a (usually short) time period. In this case, instead of having items shipped to people, Norwegian Air shipped lucky winners themselves to their selected items for free. Users would choose an item up for grabs before the clock ran out, and enter their info to enter the sweepstakes.

With only three weeks to build the microsite, at the peak of the holiday season, Black & Red pulled off the launch flawlessly. The animation-heavy site wasn’t easy to create: each animation had to interact with the rest in order for the flash sale to work properly. Each time a new item from Norwegian Air’s international collection went on sale, an email would automatically be sent to all users who had signed up to alert them. Once that item expired, a new one would rotate to the prime spot and take its place -- this chain reaction continued with 20 prizes over five days. Between the complex animation interaction on the site and the time-sensitive email campaign, the flash sale promotion required that everything be synced perfectly, with no room for error.

Within three minutes of the first item going live, there were close to 1,000 submissions for the first item’s sweepstakes. Soon, we had 1,000+ interactions on the site each minute, and 100,000+ submissions for the sweepstakes overall.