Socceranto: Birth of a Language
What We Did
The brief was to win coverage, buzz and traffic for the self-publishing platform Lulu.com, at the time of the 2006 World Cup in Germany, We did so by inventing an international language for football/soccer and publishing the result on Lulu itself in a book called Socceranto: Birth Of A Language.
Outcome
The result was huge global coverage and buzz – everywhere from Reuters and The New York Times to CNN, The BBC, The Guardian, The Washington Post, The People’s Daily in China; from Russian and Spanish TV to national press in Italy and Argentina, and even the blog of the World Cup itself. Googling “Socceranto” at one point delivered 98,000 Google results. The coverage, buzz and resulting surge in traffic played a key role in helping Lulu’s visitor numbers rise by almost sevenfold in 18 months and Lulu as a business grow by over 10% PER MONTH.
Coverage
The story got huge global coverage – from Reuters to The New York Times, CNN to the BBC and Yahoo!, The Guardian to the Boston Globe to The People's Daily in China. Some coverage highlights include:
- Reuters
- CNN
- The Guardian
- The New York Times
- The BBC (UK + global)
- The Washington Post
- The Boston Globe
- Yahoo!
- Fox Sports
- The Daily Mirror (UK)
- The (London) Evening Standard
- The People's Daily (China)
- La Repubblica (Italy)
- Corriere della Serra (Italy)
- The Taipei Times (Taiwan)
- National coverage in:
- Canada
- Spain
- Russia
- India
- Middle-East
- South Africa
- Malaysia
- Kenya
