One of the most-awarded, most-talked about and most-imitated (knowingly or unknowingly) pieces of work I’ve worked on was/is The Tweet Shop in September 2012, or to give it its full name, The Kellogg’s Special K Cracker Crisps Tweet Shop.
The brief from Kellogg’s was to launch its new, “innovative”, Special K Cracker Crisps, which were low calorie potato crisps (or chips if reading in the US). We had press office covered off with product placement, personalised packaging, celebrity seeding, influencer seeding, etc, but wanted to add in a creative idea that would make the crisps a talking point and excite consumer media and trade. A big ask, but we were up for the challenge.
I remember briefing it out to the agency, but I don’t for the life of me remember who actually had the idea of opening the world’s first shop where people would pay for goods (in this case Special K Cracker Crisps) with social, instead of financial, currency – i.e. Tweet a message in exchange for a free pack of low calorie crisps. I think it was me, but I know of at least one other who claimed the idea, so maybe I didn’t. I do know I was obsessed at the time with the concept of Liking or Tweeting something in exchange for lowering the price of a product, and was trying to sell a ‘Tweet the Price of Our Car Down’ idea to Chevrolet – an idea that was eventually done by AutoTrader. The line of ‘get someone to do something and reward them for doing so’ thinking followed an earlier idea we implemented for the online beauty brand, feelunique.com, where we paid people to have the company’s name (temporarily) tattooed on their eyelids and go around winking at people. Tattooing a logo wasn’t an original idea, but I liked the term “Pay-Per-Wink” and therefore an idea was born and a lot of fun was had casting the office to find the perfect model eyelid. The tactic generated national and international coverage including a leader in The New York Times, loads of entries to be a “winker”, loads of traffic to feelunique.com and loads of sales, so it worked.
Anyway, if I didn’t have the idea, I was certainly thinking that way, and it made it into the pitch alongside two others, which I definitely don’t remember. When I’m writing a pitch, I’m often trying to sell an idea with a headline and a key visual. The headline usually has a bit of wit, but tells the story. In this case the headline was ‘The Tweet Shop’, which was a play on a ‘Sweet Shop’ (keep up at the back). The accompanying visual needs to give the client enough direction so they can see what it might look like and therefore take any nervousness away, which sounds obvious, but isn’t easy to do and does take a long time to find, which is why I try to read, see and store as many photographs into my memory bank as possible knowing that one day they may come in useful. The visual I used is below (an old-fashioned sweet shop with scripted signage), which is how I saw the idea being executed with piles of crisps in sweet jars. I didn’t have the time to get the idea scamped up so we just had to go with the image and hoped they would have enough imagination to see how it could look.
Off we went to Manchester to pitch what was a fairly small budget project, but a good brand and we felt we had a nice programme so were confident.
We won it, beating four others, I think. They liked the press office element so that could start immediately, but wanted much more detail on The Tweet Shop: where would it be, what would it look like, how would it work, who would staff it, how much stock would we need, when would we send the invites to bloggers, when would we contact broadcast media, etc. All questions that needed answers, but months turned into weeks as we developed the idea and eventually we only left ourselves about four weeks to turn it from idea to reality and the budget was tiny. The pressure was on.
Whenever there is pressure I always call Brian at Helix 3D who is my Mr Can Do. I knew he could fabricate a shopfront and interior in no time at all so it was all about finding a central London location on a shoestring budget. The agency had not long been bought by the Engine Group, so I ended up asking/begging the experiential agency, Slice, to get involved too and they came up trumps with a location in Soho. I was a bit worried about the name of the street – Meard Street – as all I kept thinking was ‘Shit Street’ based on my GCSE French knowledge of the word ‘Merde’, but I didn’t have a second option so simply pronounced it Me-ard Street every time I spoke to the client and crossed my fingers that no journalist would be mean enough to call anything “shit”.
My thought process pretty much from the pitch was to recreate the old-fashioned sweet shop, but the Kellogg’s client (who was the target audience) wanted it more aligned with a female audience so suggested it became more of a fashion boutique where people could sit and try the crisps. It was a good build on the concept so we went with it, although it was a stressful pivot on both sides as time was running out.
We eventually got the shop design agreed and approved, the contract signed with the space on Meard Street, and the build was in motion. And then I got a call from Brian… The owner of the venue was a writer who lived above it, and he was threatening to pull the plug on the job as the sound of drilling was interrupting his creative thinking! Brian told me his name, and I Googled him on the way down to the venue, which was only a 10m minute walk from the office. When I got there, I apologised profusely about the noise, promised him an expensive bottle of red wine when it was all over, and told him I was a big fan of his books, which won him over. Flattery does get you somewhere, sometimes. And because I felt bad about lying, I did end up reading his books and giving him some free advice on how to promote them.
With the shop fitted out all we needed were the Special K Cracker Crisps. And, of course, there was a problem. I forget exactly what it was, but I know that getting stock direct from a factory to a venue the day before an event is never a good idea, and not something I’ll ever rely on again in the future. We had a shop (just about), but no stock. The day the shop opened was the day Special K Cracker Crisps launched in Sainsbury’s so all we could do was ring every London store and see if they had had any deliveries. Most hadn’t, but we found a few and between us we were at the supermarket’s doors at 6am in the morning buying every pack of cracker crisps we could have got hold of. The snack buyers must have thought they were onto a hit when they saw week one sales figures. We managed to source enough so that we could press ahead, which was a relief as we had some broadcast media lined up that afternoon.
Because I’d taken on the role of production manager, I hadn’t really thought about the photography. In those days I shot with Ken Lennox, who was four times British photographer of the year, the ex-picture editor of the News of the World, The Sun and Daily Express, and who really was the best at getting news photography and getting it in. Even he was a bit stumped with it as, when all said an done, it was just a shop with crisps in it. Thankfully (the very photogenic) Kim Murray, who worked at Slice, braved the rain and took on the role of excited ‘customer’ with phone and crisps in hand and The Tweet Shop sign in the background. It was our only hero shot and fortunately made the Metro the next day, which along with some key national online outlets including Mail Online, The Guardian Online and BBC News online was a good start, I thought.
Obviously you aim for a clean sweep on the day coverage is expected, but from memory we were up against some big business stories, and media thought it was all a bit of a gimmick (which it was, but hey, it could be the future). So we slogged at it for a couple of weeks and eventually just about hit the client KPIs, which was a relief more than a celebration. And then, unbeknownst to us, Social Media Week happened and the Kellogg’s Special K Cracker Crisps Tweet Shop was the talk of the digital marketing town, which kicked off thousands of ‘branded conversations’ (a term we coined) online and when everyone is telling the client how great something is, they find it hard to disagree. More coverage, and awards, followed and it continues to be written about today as an example of social media engagement/interaction/[insert latest buzzword].
In truth, looking back, I’m not sure it was such a great idea as it didn’t say much about the product, but Kellogg’s was being innovative launching Special K crisps, and this was an innovative way to market them, so it just about worked I suppose.
Kellogg’s ending up rolling out Tweet (and Instagram) Shops all over the world as part of their new product launch strategy, which is good as it was eventual validation they rated the idea and results, but also annoying as we never got asked (or paid) for any of it. Which is another useful lesson to learn: when agreeing a contract, always include a line about usage rights!
The spooky part about the whole project was that, totally co-incidentally, my long-term friend (and only person I’ve had a genuine creative partnership with) Donald Swanepoel, who I worked with at Cow PR and Cow Africa, was building the world’s first Twitter-activated vending machine in South Africa for BOS Ice Tea at pretty much the same time as we were developing The Tweet Shop. I only knew about this when his name turned up in international coverage alongside ours. He technically went first date-wise so is officially the first person to come up with the idea of social currency replacing financial currency, but I hold on to the fact we were the first to roll it out in a shop. This kind of co-incidence really does make me think that yes, anyone can come up with a good idea, but there are only a handful who can consistently come up with good ideas and actually make them happen. Donald is one of those people and I’ll do a separate post on him at some point because he taught me so much in the brief spell we worked together.
A load of old Barnum. 