Recently, TweetReach customer Exposed PR, along with C&I Studios, ran a very creative promotion with their client IKEA. We love to highlight interesting – and successful – PR campaigns, so read on for more about this cool promotion.
In July, Exposed PR and C&I Studios teamed up with IKEA to organize an in-store scavenger hunt with an online twist. Called Capture the Catalog, this promotion pitted 11 teams against each other in a scavenger hunt at the IKEA store in Sunrise, Florida, just outside Fort Lauderdale. Teams competed to complete a set of tasks in the store, and tweeted about their achievements as they went, trying to get as many retweets as possible. The teams were competing to see who could generate the most impressions on Twitter in 90 minutes. Exposed PR used TweetReach to track these tweets and measure each team’s impressions. They generated more than 8 million impressions in just an hour and half, reaching more than 700,000 unique Twitter accounts!
We talked to Sara Shake of Exposed PR, one of the creators of this promotion, to understand more about where this clever idea came from and how everything went.
First, tell us a little about the IKEA Capture the Catalog Tournament. What was the goal of this promotion?
The goal of the Ikea promotion was to launch their 2012 Catalog. As a company, Ikea has a few different times throughout the year that are extremely important, and their catalog launch is the biggest. We wanted a creative way to get the word out that didn’t include the typical Media Day festivities that they had done in the past.
How did you come up with the idea for this promotion?
I share my office with a company called C&I Studios. It’s not unusual for us at the end of the day to start speaking in terms of “What If.” Once we’ve completed all the work for the day, we always try to spend sometime just brainstorming without the limitations of the clients that we currently service. We don’t think about location or budget, we just bounce ideas until something sticks. We call these ideas our 5 O’Clock Miracles.
This idea came largely from my frequent frustration with traditional media… We (Joshua Miller from C&I Studios and I) thought there has to be a better way to get the word out, without the help of traditional media. Then we thought about how competition drives people. The original concept was Capture the Flag (which is where Capture the Catalog came from), but it evolved into a scavenger hunt. We knew we needed a forward-thinking brand to latch onto the idea…and this was just about the time that you started hearing about Ikea letting the cats loose in Sweden. We said “We need a brand like Ikea!” We were lucky enough to have one in the neighborhood, so we just called.
How did you decide who won?
The first-place winner was the team with the highest number of impressions of their unique hash tag during the 90-minute scavenger hunt.
What role did TweetReach play in this promotion?
TweetReach was instrumental in the Capture the Catalog tournament. We were able to set up a Tracker to live-track every team’s (there were 11) hashtag throughout the tournament. This way we were able to make announcements like, “So and so is in the lead with 350,000 impressions.” We also announced every time that we reached another million impressions of the combined hashtags. We took snapshot reports for each hashtag at the end of the tournament and that’s how we determined the winner.
What would you change for next time?
We would just find a way to make it bigger and better.
What went well? Was there anything you were particularly proud of?
We were really proud of the teams; they went all out. It was also an amazing experience to work with Ikea as a brand. They believed and bought into the vision, and took it to an entirely different level. From the graphics and signage they produced, to the staff that manned each clue, to the prize that they provided to our winners, it was totally refreshing to work with a brand that didn’t cut a single corner. They were exceptionally thoughtful down to the last detail.
What did IKEA think?
They loved it! In a Miami Herald article about the event, Chantal Nichtawitz, marking manager at Ikea Sunrise, said, “We were certain that the event drove traffic to the store. That Saturday we had one of the biggest Saturdays we’ve seen in over a calendar year.”
Do you have any recommendations or tips for someone running their own promotion or contest on Twitter?
The key is finding the right brand and participants.
You can follow Exposed PR, C&I Studios, and the IKEA Sunrise store on Twitter.