'Old Timer's Machine' wins Best use of email for Rackspace

Rackspace provides managed hosting and managed email solutions. Its services include web hosting, data warehousing, hosting online applications and managed email hosting. Rackspace has built its reputation around a commitment to customer support, which it calls 'Fanatical support'. The firm assigns substantial resources to creating and maintaining awareness, which is its key differentiator over competitors.  

Thanks to 'Fanatical support', Rackspace enjoys an exceptionally high customer retention rate, a fact that it was keen to communicate to the widest possible audience of top-level hosting users.

Gets better with age
The campaign message was simple: once a Rackspace customer, defection is unlikely as 'Fanatical support' goes on forever. Humour and involvement brings messages alive, so Rackspace felt that an interactive viral campaign involving humour would reach the widest audience possible and direct people to the Rackspace website. It would be entertaining, memorable and encourage the users to involve friends and business associates.

The resulting concept was the 'Old timer's machine', www.theoldtimersmachine.com, an online interactive programme which showed people what they would look like in 20 yers time - when they were still Rackspace customers. Users simply uploaded an image of themselves, a colleague, or searched Google for a famous or infamous stand in. The user, as the makeover artist, can then manipulate it using a series of simple tools to add grey hair, baldness, wrinkles and various outrageous accessories to mimic the effect of age.