The folks at Huge are to be commended on a truly brilliant native advertising campaign. Hired by the makers of President Cheese, they were stuck with a way to somehow drum up social media interest in a gooey wheel of stinky cheese. What they came up with will be talked about in hush three-martini lunches up and down Madison Avenue for years.
The client was nervous, this was their first foray into the wild, wooly world of the twitter. Corporate lawyers were all over them, pouring over every syllable. The head cheese at President Cheese demanded review of all creative, ensuring everything stayed on message. The campaign, carefully honed after months of travel up and down the corporate approval ladder was, “The Art of Cheese”
Each of the 140 characters were hand-crafted and chiseled to exacting specifications. Plurals and Singulars became the topic of weekend off-sites. Active or passive voice? How do we capture the tone. We want to be friendly but not too casual. @DrFNFurter was studied closely and discussed at length. The result?
The brilliance of the mundane. Each part of the tweet and embedded image is engineered to be ignored. This tweet was designed to fail. Two favorites? Perfect! Too much attention and all their hard-earned work would have been wasted.
Knowing that a twitter account with a less than 300 followers would get lost in the wind, the agency set into motion the crucial second stage of their viral campaign. Buying placement on a visible tech blog, they took out a native advertising placement that would allow them to weave a story of pity and woe that would unleash the full sarcastic fury of the internet wilds.
The story would talk about how hard people worked to come up with their lonely tweet. People would point and laugh at the lead image showing how serious people can look while staring at rando twitter profiles with a background image screaming, “$450 crack party”
Choice quotes would get pulled out and shared,
Social media is definitely perceived like you’re just dicking around on the internet all day, and I do a fair amount of that,
and
I think that if people give you a hard time for it, it’s really because they’re more jealous that they don’t have a fun job.
All this additional attention would turn a boring tweet blipped out to 227 followers into a focal point of conversation. President Cheese and the Art of Cheese would be the hot topic of discussion. Laugh all you want but that tweet screen-captured above that had only two favs? It’s on fire!
Sharing a Camembert with friends? (How generous!) Get the best flavor by serving at room temperature. #artofcheese pic.twitter.com/R6iWPeKv1z
— President Cheese (@presidentcheese) April 30, 2014
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