We took on Clas Ohlson, the third-largest Swedish retailer after Ikea and H&M, as a new digital services client in March this year.
For the uninitiated, this brief visual overview available on their company history page indicates the size and value of the company.
While huge in Sweden, Clas Ohlson is not a widely known brand name in the UK, so when the home and hardware chain took on DAC Creative services, it was in order to raise awareness for the brand, increase social followings and generate engagement and conversation.
Month one’s campaign, an April Fool’s prank based around pretending to launch a range of Brexit-related products, did extremely well, generating just under 5000 post interactions, 136 comments and 197 shares – a huge achievement for a socially quiet brand that, up until that month, rarely received many more than 10 likes per post.
For May, however, the client asked us to digitally support the launch of a new range of pet products. The brief was to generate conversation and awareness for their range of pet items as Clas Ohlson is not typically connected with products like this.
To spread the message far and wide, we decided we needed to go down the user-generated content route. Getting people to post their own content for you not only saves you in ideation, creation and promotion time, but you are reaching out beyond your standard audience to the friendship circles of all those who posted content.
We decided to launch a competition – an effort to find Britain’s CLASsiest pet (get it?). This would involve UK residents taking original footage of their pet and posting it on Instagram with the hashtag #COClassiestPetUK.
To further build out Clas Ohlson’s online audience, we included in the terms and conditions that entrants had to be following the brand’s Facebook and Instagram profiles in order to be eligible to win.
Key information
- Winner: £500 Cash, £300 Clas Ohlson Voucher, Pet Gift Basket*
- Second Place: £200 Clas Ohlson Voucher, Pet Gift Basket
- Runner up (1): Pet Gift Basket
- Runner up (2): Pet Gift Basket
*Pet Gift Basket – We would organise these gift baskets around the individual winners in an attempt to spark more social media conversation.
What were we looking for in your pet?
Classy is an ambiguous word, but it did best encapsulate the qualities we were looking for – one or more of the following:
- Sophistication
- Individuality/eccentricity
- Skill/talent
- Helpfulness/compassion
Launching the competition
To kick off the competition and provide boosts at strategic intervals throughout its course, we created some fun eye-catching visuals to boost and promote across the three main social networks to spread the word. Some of these are below:
This received over 3.7k likes and comments on Instagram
This received 4.3k impressions across the networks and gained 1.7k interactions on Instagram alone.
To inspire people, and prolong the conversation we threw out a few fun animal GIFs of animals being clumsy as a tongue-in-cheek demonstration of ‘what we’re not looking for.’ Who doesn’t love animal ‘fails?’ The ad reached 60,000 people and was watched 26k times.
The content we made in house was clearly going down extremely well, but it was the user-created videos that we were most excited about.
You can explore the Instagram entries here. We also, received an additional 24 videos across the other social networks – great for exposure, not so good for the entrants themselves (as the guidelines clearly stated the video had to be uploaded to Instagram).
In addition to reaching over 100,000 British animal lovers, we received over 5,500 reactions, comments and shares; we ended the competition with a load of original video content. We created a fun compilation of our favourite entries and shared it across Facebook and Twitter. It has received more than 12k views since being put live just over a month ago. Who doesn’t love pet videos?
You can watch the final video here.
We received a host of messages, both private and public, informing us of the fun the entrants and follower-spectators had during the competition. Perhaps the most pleasing of all were those from the winners (and their pets) themselves. The following Tweet was from adorable Twitter celeb Charli Brown, who came in third.
Stay classy, UK pets!
