The_Participation_Playbook1
Pick 2 pillars from the Participation Playbook from Twitter (that was required reading in this module.) Find an example (not used in the reading) of a brand (ANY brand) using the best practice described in the pillar. Include the actual tweet (both as a screenshot, but also a live link) in your document. (Note if you are fancy, you can learn a bit about how to get the embed code from a Tweet (Links to an external site.) and then use Google Doc’s ability to embed code).
https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/how-to-embed-a-tweet
How do you become a
global talking point –
for the right reasons?
Contagious’ James Swift and Twitter’s
Alex Josephson look at some of the best
Twitter-led campaigns from Cannes,
and speak to the brands and agencies
behind the work, to find out what it takes
to make content worth talking about.
I n June 2
01
8 IHOP (International House of Pancakes) Tweeted that it was changing its name to IHOb and invited people to guess what it meant.
‘In our wildest dreams, we wouldn’t have imagined
it would be the phenomenon that it became,’ says the
brand’s CMO, Brad Haley, about the campaign to highlight
the US restaurant chain’s burger menu.
There’s no false modesty at IHOP. You’d have to be
delusional to expect a few cryptic Tweets to attract 42
billion earned media impressions, occupy the first, second
and fourth spots on Twitter’s trending topics list (crowd-
ing out even US President Donald Trump’s summit with
North Korea) and quadruple burger sales.
But that’s the nature of Twitter, where the audience is
in charge. Some ideas sink without a trace, but those
that hit the sweet spot are elevated and shared,
IHOP’s
name-change
guessing
game Tweet
attracted
42 billion
earned media
impressions
becoming entwined with culture. Occasionally people
will spread an idea or message with such force and
heat that it catches even the most optimistic marketers
off guard.
And while it may feel like audiences exercise their power
capriciously, success is rarely a case of dumb luck on the
part of the brand. The best marketers understand what
makes people want to participate with an idea or message
and they put that knowledge to work to give themselves
the best shot at success.
Ahead of the Cannes Lions International Festival of
Creativity, we went through the 1,856 Twitter-centric
entries submitted to the competition between 2014 and
2018, and then picked the brains of the people behind
the most innovative and awarded work from that dataset,
to pass some of that knowledge on to you.
Finding the thread
Analysing the data, it is clear that Twitter is not the same
place today that it was in 2014, let alone when it was
created in 2006.
Just like punk emerged as the antithesis to the over-
wrought odysseys of the prog-rock movement, Twitter
first flourished as a pared-back alternative to blogging
that compelled people to be succinct with their thoughts.
But as more people joined the platform it evolved
beyond its microblogging origins; conversation became
more important, and communities sprang up around
shared identities and interests. And the addition of images
and video also gave users a richer canvas to express
themselves.
Brands were forced to evolve in step with these
changes. ‘In the early days, brands were using Twitter like
01
they were broadcasting on TV,’ says Bao Tu-Ngoc, head
of digital and activations at BETC Paris. ‘But now they
understand the value of interactions, so they’ve started
designing “real conversations” on social media.’
As luck would have it, this shift to conversations is
conducive to more effective work. Les Binet and Peter
Field in their Media in Focus paper for The Institute of
Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) reiterate that the strate-
gies that get people talking about a brand are powerful and
efficient because ‘brand effects are enhanced by social
amplification and herd behaviour’, and they calculate that
earned media boosts effectiveness by 26%.
But as brands have become more sophisticated conver-
sationalists, it has led them to some unexpected places.
Fast food chain Wendy’s, for instance, now uses Twitter to
host a National Roast Day each year on 4 January, when it
delivers withering put-downs to anyone who asks for one.
In 2018 this festival of insults received a Silver and Gold
Lion in the Social & Influencer category at Cannes, and
in 2019 it resulted in more than 100 million earned media
impressions and a 737% increase in brand mentions.
Brand conversation lurched to another extreme in
February when the Twitter account belonging to drink
brand Sunny Delight Tweeted: ‘I can’t do this anymore.’ The
despairing message may have just been a reaction to the
lacklustre Super Bowl game, but it sparked an impassioned
conversation thread about mental health with almost 5,000
replies (some other brands joined in by offering advice;
Pornhub offered tissues) and also became a news item
in the wider media.
Not only did @SunnyD’s depressive episode show
how brands on Twitter are experimenting with how they
communicate, it also highlighted how things that happen
on the platform reverberate in other media.
While Twitter once offered people a forum to discuss
what was happening in the news or on TV, it is now just
as likely that people on TV will be discussing what they’ve
seen on Twitter. If you’re not sure what we mean, think about
Jimmy Kimmel’s widely imitated Mean Tweets segment, or
how in 2015 #TheDress (you know: the white and gold or
blue and black one) transcended Twitter and entered the
global news cycle.
Such is Twitter’s influence that when Crock-Pot suf-
fered a PR disaster (a slow cooker was responsible for
the death of a beloved character on a popular TV show…
it’s a long story), Ashley Mowrey, the cooking appliance
brand’s director of global social media marketing, tells us
she made Twitter her priority: ‘We knew if we won over the
conversation on social, primarily Twitter, that would help
to inform and impact traditional media coverage as well.’
Twitter has become a self-sufficient water cooler
medium – one that generates discussions as well as
hosting them. And as its influence has grown so too have
brands’ ambitions for the platform. The early days when
all you needed was a clever hashtag or a funny character
account to win on Twitter are long gone. Our research
shows that now the most forward-thinking brands treat
Twitter as a Petri dish where ideas and messages are
dropped in the hope of (ahem) creating culture.
Around 2014 some of the more daring brands used
Twitter to effect small-scale changes in the real world,
In the early days, brands
were using Twitter like they
were broadcasting on TV.
Now they understand the
value of interactions
Bao Tu-Ngoc, BETC Paris
Wendy’s chart-
topping album
We Beefin?
was conceived
on Twitter
such as Sky Television’s 2014 #BringDownTheKing
campaign, which encouraged people to Tweet using a
hashtag to bring down a statue of a hated Game of Thrones
character in real life.
But by 2018 we saw campaigns that made real global
cultural impact. Wendy’s released an album on Twitter
that reached number 34 in the iTunes charts and number
one in Spotify’s Global Viral 50 chart. Athlete and activist
Colin Kaepernick sparked one of the biggest news stories
across the globe that day when he Tweeted his new Nike
campaign, created by Wieden+Kennedy Portland, which
ended up boosting the brand’s market cap by $6bn in
less than three weeks.
From what we’ve seen, it’s clear that conversation and
culture underpin the best Twitter campaigns today. In
fact, we’d go further and say they are the foundation of
any great campaign that seeks to elicit a response from
its audience. So we have developed six pillars based on
conversation and culture that we believe lead to this kind
of work. This is the Participation Playbook.
02
Pillar 1 / Take out your Air Pods
‘Twitter is the best platform for real-time conversations
on topics you need to think about right now,’ says Ron
Amram, global media lead at The Heineken Company. ‘It’s
great for keeping track of what you’re passionate about
or what you’re interested in.’ But you’d only know that if
you’re really tuning in.
Anywhere people go to talk, brands should go to listen,
and Twitter is a powerful resource for marketers that
want to know what their audience thinks, without rely-
ing on claimed data from surveys or stilted focus-group
conversations. We asked agencies for some advanced
listening tips.
Droga5, New York, created the Behind The Scenes Of
The Mega Huge Football Ad We Almost Made campaign
for Heineken’s Newcastle Brown Ale in 2014, which won
a Silver Cyber Lion at Cannes in 2014. It was also short-
listed in the Mobile category at Cannes in 2017 for its
#BreakTheGame work with Under Armour. The agency’s
head of media, Colleen Leddy, tells us, ‘We have a com-
munity manager and a data strategist do a lot of social
listening to understand what the community’s saying.’
The thing to note here is that it is not interns let loose
to find out what’s trending; the job is taken seriously
and staffed accordingly. As in any field, inexperienced
researchers can contaminate results with their own bias,
which means inaccurate insights. But when you know how
to listen to your audience and make time to do so, you can
create more than just better marketing. Glossier founder
Emily Weiss represents the apotheosis of the practice,
building a unicorn company (worth $1.2bn) by listening
to the ideas of passionate make-up fans and then giving
them what they wanted.
Taking a leaf out of Glossier’s book, Burger King in
2017 introduced spicy chicken nuggets to its menu after
seeing people on Twitter complain about Wendy’s ditching
its own. It then went a step further and used those angry
Tweets to launch its new product, turning them into ads on
Twitter. The campaign helped sell three months worth of
crispy golden nuggets in just four weeks and was short-
listed for a Social & Influencer Lion at Cannes in 2018.
Michael Cassell, former VP of strategy at MullenLowe
Miami, which created the campaign, says the agency
devised an informal strategy to decide whether to respond
to audience chatter.
‘There are big, huge moments that everyone tries to
get on top of,’ he says, ‘but then there are a lot of little
moments that a good chunk of people care about. When
we’re looking up conversations, we start by looking at
those little moments. We create clusters of different pas-
sion points and we monitor them, and when something
is sparking within that passion point we try to have an
opinion there.’ Cassell adds that it is much more striking
for consumers to see ‘a brand join a niche conversation
than that national hashtag holiday that everyone is trying
to talk about’.
Crystal Rix, chief strategy officer at BBDO New York,
looks for ‘judo’ moments at the ‘intersection of where
culture is going and what your brand stands for’. In the
same way that practitioners of the martial art throw their
opponents by redirecting their momentum, marketers
should look for cultural conversations that can be directed
into their brand stories, says Rix.
When a Chevrolet spokesman got tongue-tied during the
Most Valuable Player trophy presentation at the Major League
Baseball World Series, blurting out that his brand’s trucks
boasted class-leading ‘technology and stuff’, he became
a laughing stock on Twitter. Rather than fight or ignore the
brouhaha, Chevrolet, working with FleishmanHillard in
St Louis, used judo and joined in with the joke, incorpo-
rating #TechnologyAndStuff into its online and traditional
media advertising. This nifty manoeuvre delivered 63 million
impressions for the brand and increased pre-release pur-
chase interest for the Chevrolet Colorado truck by 350%.
The campaign also won a Gold PR Lion at Cannes in 2015.
True judo masters also understand that the maturity of a
cultural conversation should dictate the response. ‘Some
conversations are nascent and they need brands to help
drive awareness behind them,’ says Rix. More mature
conversations require a more considered approach:
brands need to show up with solutions, or risk looking
like opportunistic bandwagon jumpers.
Rix says BBDO uses Omnicom’s proprietary insights
platform Omni to track conversations: ‘We have a semantic
tool that helps you understand the level of conversation
and who’s having that conversation. And once something
peaks, it won’t pop anymore […] because it’s not relevant
to your audience anymore, it’s just in the mainstream.’
It’s critical, adds Rix, that brands understand ‘where
the curve of a conversation is and what people need from
brands at that [point in the] curve’.
Burger King
used Twitter
complaints
about Wendy’s
ditching
spicy nuggets
to promote
its own
03
Pillar 2 / Communication beats consumption
Creating content is one thing. But brands that really make
an impact become conduits for communication. Ze Frank,
BuzzFeed’s former chief of research and development,
hit the nail on the head when he said: ‘Repurposing […]
media not for consumption but for communication is, I
think, the underpinning of this social age.’
Put less philosophically, that means people will share
something if they can use it to either express themselves
or to communicate with someone else. That can be
because a piece of content tells someone that you know
how they are feeling (what Frank calls emotional content),
tells someone that you know something about who they
are (identity content), or because sharing something
implies some kind of insider knowledge or status on your
part (informational content).
These rules may have been developed in the context
of BuzzFeed videos, but they contain kernels of insight
that can be applied more widely.
For example, REI and Venables Bell & Partners’
#OptOutside campaign was one of the few instances
where a brand can claim to have created a movement, not
just a conversation, and it can be explained with reference
to the identity principle.
When the outdoor retailer posted on Twitter in 2015
that it was shutting its stores on Black Friday to encour-
age people to explore the wilderness, more than 1.4
million people used the brand’s hashtag and that year
REI signed up a record number of new members to its
co-operative. People shared and participated with the
campaign because it was an easy shorthand for signal-
ling disapproval of rabid consumerism and an affinity
with REI’s aims.
If you can combine intrinsic motivators (like #OptOutside)
with extrinsic motivators (like prizes and rewards) so much
the better. Volvo demonstrated the power of checking
both boxes with its 2015 Interception campaign. Any
time another car commercial aired on TV during the
Super Bowl, people could Tweet at Volvo and nominate
someone they thought deserved to win one of its cars.
As well as offering intrinsic and extrinsic motivators, Volvo
also gave us a ‘judo’ masterclass, redirecting momentum
and hijacking the stage that other brands had paid dearly
to occupy. Volvo and Grey New York were rewarded for
this nifty flip with a 70% sales lift and a Grand Prix in the
Direct category at Cannes in 2015.
But if we had to recommend one motivator over the
other it would be intrinsic. Neuroscience has shown
how often emotions rule our decision-making processes
and, in their effectiveness research for the IPA, Binet and
Field demonstrate that emotional advertising is needed in
greater proportions than rational messaging over the long
term. ‘In the long run,’ Binet has been quoted as saying,
‘emotion is where the really big profits lie.’
04
Repurposing media
not for consumption
but for communication
is the underpinning of
this social age
Ze Frank, former BuzzFeed
chief of research and development
People latched
on to REI’s
#OptOutside
as a means of
self-identifying,
while Volvo
added a
reward motive
into the mix
Pillar 3 / Get beyond first impressions
As Twitter has evolved, so too have the metrics that
brands and agencies measure to determine success.
Brands and agencies originally coveted impressions but
the brand safety scares and revelations about bots and
click farms that have plagued certain platforms soured
the guilty pleasure of chasing cheap reach for marketers
more generally.
In place of impressions, engagements took root as
the favoured metric of marketers but this too passed.
Subsequently, more and more brands put stock in senti-
ment as the best indication that a campaign was succeed-
ing, but Jen McDonald, chief client officer at VMLY&R,
North America, says her agency now advocates a more
holistic view. It still looks at the interplay of impressions,
engagement and sentiment, but changing people’s atti-
tudes and making sales are better goals. ‘If someone
sees, interacts or comes in contact with this, are they
more likely to feel better about the brand or purchase the
brand?’ she says. ‘That’s super important to us.’
Accordingly, the Twitter-led work winning at Cannes
over the years has increasingly hinged on real-world
outcomes and deeper connections with consumers. In
2018, Verizon used Twitter to find rivals’ customers who
were complaining that their network provider kept drop-
ping signal, making it hard for them to stream college
basketball games. Verizon responded by sending them
written reports of what they had just missed (and hired
NBA legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to help). The cam-
paign, which was shortlisted at Cannes Lions in 2018,
spread because it was cheeky and innovative, but it also
answered individual user frustrations with a useful service
that demonstrated why Verizon was better than its rivals.
‘[Often] when you look at case studies in Cannes they
talk about a million of these and six thousand that,’ says
Corel Theuma, group creative director at R/GA New
York, the agency behind the Verizon campaign. ‘But I
think that once you have a customer that you serviced
well one-to-one through a campaign, I think you will have
that customer for a while.’
You can’t put the cart (the results) before the horse (the
idea), but ask yourself: what will you measure or how will
you define success next time you create something on
Twitter? If all you can think of is retweets and comments,
then you’re likely thinking too small.
05
Verizon
cheekily (and
helpfully)
responded
to people’s
frustrated
Tweets about
rival broadband
suppliers
Pillar 4 / Think small to launch big
Still, there are times when thinking small is the right thing to
do. VMLY&R’s Jen McDonald knows a thing or two about
success on Twitter (her agency works with Wendy’s) and
she says: ‘If you’re trying to hit a home run every single
time, you’re going to strike out.’
If you have the mindset that everything you do must spread
to the far corners of the platform and break out into culture,
you will likely paralyse yourself with anxiety, or try only a
narrow range of ideas. Some of the biggest successes
on Twitter come from ideas that were unburdened by
great expectations.
McDonald says Wendy’s best work was done by cultivat-
ing lots of little ideas. Take #NuggsForCarter, when Wendy’s
challenged a fan to get 18 million retweets in return for a year
of free chicken nuggets. This was the most retweeted Tweet
of all time until earlier this year (when a Japanese billionaire
offered cash prizes to people who spread his Tweet), and
won a Silver PR Lion at Cannes in 2017.
People think about it as a lucky break for Wendy’s but
McDonald describes it as something that only came about
because Wendy’s had patiently built a base of fans, through
fun little interactions that got people laughing and talking
about the brand. This eventually inspired some 16-year-
old kid in Reno to get in touch on Twitter. As well as being
a helpful mindset that encourages brands and agencies
to take risks, thinking small has other virtues. If you craft
a message to appeal to lots of people, few will care. But
if you create something that appeals to more specialised
tastes and interests, they will be more inclined to spread it
because they are passionate. Think of it like the ripple after
a pebble is dropped into water.
‘When you hit a nerve at the very centre of a community
that is highly engaged, the people that you touch first have
the most momentum and energy and that creates the rip-
ple,’ says BBDO’s Crystal Rix, who adds that messages
can then spread far and wide due to people’s overlapping
membership of various groups and communities. Eventually
social proof takes effect, and people share or participate
with something simply because so many others have.
This may sound like advice that runs counter to the
widely accepted theories of Professor Byron Sharp of the
Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science. He argues
that brands grow because they appeal to the widest pos-
sible audience and that targeting is largely pointless. But
we believe there is a distinction here, and it’s the difference
between creating advertising messages and creating ideas
that riff on – and fuel – the public conversation.
06
When you hit a nerve
at the very centre of a
community that is highly
engaged, the people that
you touch first have the
most momentum
and energy and that
creates the ripple
Crystal Rix, BBDO New York
By steadily
engaging
a base of
fans with fun
interactions,
Wendy’s
inspired
#NuggsForCarter
Pillar 5 / Parlez-vous Twitter?
Former copywriter and creativity pundit Dave Trott tells a
story about George Patton to make a point about adver-
tising language. The US general once told a journalist,
‘When I want my men to remember something important,
to really make it stick, I give it to them double dirty […] You
can’t run an army without profanity.’
The point here is not that swearing is innately useful,
it’s that you need to speak the language of your audience
and if that means getting a bit savage, do it.
The brands that we spoke to with the strongest voice on
Twitter agreed that letting corporate tones or jargon leak
into the messaging is the fastest way to ruin a conversation.
When Crock-Pot was blamed for the death of the beloved
patriarch Jack Pearson on the TV show This is Us, the brand
took to Twitter to conduct damage control. Social media
director Ashley Mowrey had to convince her leadership
team to abandon the brand’s regular tone of voice.
‘We used a lot of emojis,’ explains Mowrey. ‘We also
used a lot of the same vernacular that they were using
[…] One that sticks out in my mind said, “Our hearts are
broken,” and we used the broken heart emoji and said,
“Jack was our BFF too.” I think that was one of the Tweets
that was most reposted.’
Professor Karen Nelson-Field, executive director at
The Centre for Amplified Intelligence, who has written
extensively on the science of sharing, told Contagious,
‘Anything that’s highly emotional […] will get shared more.’
That rule is true for content in any medium but Nelson-Field
has found that, ‘Not only do high arousal videos share
more, but they cut through. They help you be remembered.’
The Crock-Pot campaign, created with agency Edelman,
generated 3.7 billion impressions and won a Silver Lion
in the PR category at Cannes, and Crock-Pot enjoyed
a $300,000 bump in its February sales. Looking back,
Mowrey says the brand’s only misstep at the time was
to issue a media statement in its usual corporate tone of
voice: ‘That would probably be my only regret.’
The most reliable way to avoid sounding like a corpo-
ration desperate to infiltrate the Twitter ranks is to dem-
onstrate the two qualities that companies almost never
display: self-awareness and self-deprecation.
VMLY&R’s Jen McDonald believes one other quality
is a prerequisite. She says fearlessness is necessary to
get the Twitter tone right, ‘because I think everything that
we’ve done that’s exploded has made some people a little
uncomfortable at first, before it gets out into the world’.
If that wasn’t anxiety-inducing enough for a brand, speed
is a necessity, too. Take too long to diligently weigh the
pros and cons of a message and you will have missed the
moment of impact. As a result, we found that many agencies
and brands like to set out clear and definitive guardrails
for what cannot be said but allow anything in between
those extremes.
Inevitably, part of getting the tone right on Twitter comes
down to talent; being too prescriptive about writing good
Tweets is like trying to bottle lightning.
Back in 2017, when McDonald’s Tweeted, ‘All Quarter
Pounder burgers at the majority of our restaurants will be
cooked with fresh beef,’ Wendy’s replied, ‘So you’ll still
use frozen beef in MOST of your burgers in ALL of your
restaurants? Asking for a friend.’
The snappy reply was retweeted more than 175,000
times and started a chain of discussion with more than
7,000 replies. McDonald believes it was that last bit,
the ‘asking for a friend’ that elevated the reply, by taking
‘inspiration from how people were actually talking’.
The only other thing to remember is that talent, though
important, is not enough on its own. No amount of clever
phrasing is going to trick people into talking about your
brand if your idea or campaign does not have their inter-
ests at heart. Which leads us nicely onto our final pillar…
If brands can
create something
that will represent
people’s thoughts,
then people will
be interested and
share those things
Yasu Sasaki, Dentsu Tokyo
Crock-Pot
sought to
clear its name
after being
implicated in
the death of a
much-loved TV
character
07
Pillar 6 / Remember – no one cares
In its 2019 Meaningful Brands survey, Havas reported
that people would not care if 77% of brands disappeared
tomorrow. This might make for dispiriting reading, but
the audience’s indifference is also the starting point for
effective work.
Legendary adman Howard Luck Gossage knew the
score when he wrote: ‘The buying of time or space is
not the taking out of a hunting license on someone else’s
private preserve but is the renting of a stage on which
we may perform.’
Today, that message is more relevant than ever. The
Heineken Company’s Amram explains: ‘As an old-time
media person I used to say, “Give me enough media
and I can make bad creative still work.” But in the digital
world with consumers in control, it’s a harder thing to do
[…] because it’s not a lean-back experience. I can’t force
communication down people’s throats like I used to be
able to do in a linear world.’
If you want the attention of people on Twitter you have
to say something that stops them from scrolling past, the
platform can’t do that for you. If you want your audience to
actually participate with your brand, then you’re going to
have to think hard about what you’re giving them in return.
Foot Locker’s Horse With Harden, (Bronze Lion in the
Direct category in 2015) and Play My Tweet (shortlisted
in the Promo & Activation category in 2016) campaigns,
for instance, secured participation by granting people
access to basketball superstar James Harden – something
people could never get otherwise.
Crystal Rix (whose agency BBDO created the Foot
Locker campaigns) believes ‘the consumer value exchange
is at an all-time high’. ‘Back in the day the exchange was:
“We’ll interrupt you and, for your attention, we’ll give you
some entertainment value,”’ she says, adding that, today,
that exchange is often no longer sufficient, and brands
should instead consider offering a service or some kind
of utility.
Even during Twitter’s relatively short existence, Yasu
Sasaki, Dentsu Tokyo’s executive creative director, has
noticed a raised threshold for getting people to participate
and share brands’ messages. ‘Our strategy used to be
to create something that would create a big buzz, some-
thing interesting that people would share,’ he says. ‘But
in the past three or five years, Twitter accounts became
very personal […] So if brands can create something that
will represent people’s thoughts, or if brands can create
something that speaks for the people, then people will
be interested and share those things.’ In other words,
content for communication, not consumption.
Product-first messages and strategies based on unique
selling points won’t cut it and neither will lazily buying cheap
impressions. We’ve left it this long to say it because it’s
become so hackneyed – but you must put the customer first.
Pillars to post
So there you have it. Six pillars to help you craft campaigns
that people will want to participate with. There are no
guarantees, of course. When you put your ideas in the
hands of your audience, it will always be a case of pos-
sibilities over certainties: that’s just the trade-off you must
accept when you pursue the kind of fame and resonance
that cannot be bought. But these strategies should at
least put you on your way to creating ideas that people
want to share and elevate into culture, especially if you
apply them with the overarching philosophy of marketer
Seth Godin. He believes successful brands today must
be generous, not selfish; that brands must ask themselves
whether they showed up for their audience in such a way
that they would be missed if they disappeared tomorrow.
‘What that means,’ says Godin, ‘is that we get to do
marketing with people, not to them.’
Foot Locker’s Horse With Harden upped the value
exchange by offering unique access to a basketball star
08
