'Visit Scottish Twitter' experiential

Client: Twitter

Year: 2019

Strategy | Creative | Production
Experiential | Social | Video | Advertising | Cultural Curation | PR
Campaign experience awards gold
Design Week Awards - Winner
Drum Out of Home Awards - Winner
Campaign big awards - winner
Hey Fringe-goers: you want proper comedy? You’re looking in the wrong place.
Summary

#ScottishTwitter is a community of Tweeters who create hilarious content written in a Scottish accent. Twitter wanted to celebrate their amazing tweets, and remind Twitter users what they love about the platform.

So we created Visit #ScottishTwitter, an integrated ‘tourism’ campaign, that introduced the world to the irreverent and observational tweets of #ScottishTwitter, and rewarded the community itself with an experience they’d love.

The campaign was routed in a physical real-life Scottish Twitter Visitor Centre, opened for a week at the Edinburgh Festival. OOH posters in major Edinburgh train stations welcomed visitors as they arrived, while a tourism advert starring comedian Fern Brady went out online.

It was the toast of the town: #ScottishTwitter trended, almost all major UK outlets covered it, and over 4k people (and a goat) came to the experience. Oh, and Campaign awarded it their integrated campaign of the year.

Objectives

Flying Object were tasked with reminding people of the great experience they can have on Twitter, by celebrating and rewarding those creating quality conversation on the platform - specifically, #ScottishTwitter.

We needed to show those that create #ScottishTwitter that we love them, highlight their contribution and amplify it to a broader audience. Through this we show the power of Twitter: people using the platform in their own way, to break into culture and change it.

Success was to be judged on online buzz and PR, with footfall a secondary metric.

Strategy

#ScottishTwitter is funny. Very funny. So where better to celebrate this than at the Edinburgh Fringe, the home to the world’s largest comedy festival?

We needed to enter this incredibly busy environment and say to Edinburgh Fringe-goers: the funniest thing you’ll find in Scotland is actually on Twitter.

The creative also needed to balance three things - 1) work for Scots by expressing a thorough knowledge and understanding of Scottish Twitter and Scottish culture, 2) be appealing to non-Scots too, and 3) find an appropriate role for a big Californian tech company too.

Idea

Visit #ScottishTwitter: a loving parody of the tourist visitor centres we’ve all been to, opened in the centre of historic Edinburgh, celebrating over a hundred tweets from Scotland’s greatest keyboard comedians.

We took the resolutely offline format of the visitor centre - staid, traditional - and inverted it, clashing the tropes of rural holidays against the cutting edge of online humour. The result was an unexpected, unusual, and hugely shareable physical experience that felt nothing like what you expect from branded experiential.

The thing that made me pick this winner was the creativity and absolute link to brand. They really started with the clients objective, thought about their audience and created an event that was brilliant and engaging.

Michelle Linaker, Chair of The Drum Experience Awards
What we did

Experience: The #ScottishTwitter Visitor Centre

Fancy interactive whizzbombles, augmented goggle-induced high realities or 5D printed realtime branded socials? We had none of that. Visit #ScottishTwitter is about giving non-professional comedians their time in the spotlight. The experience needed to put them on a pedestal - then let them be funny.

Visit our art gallery, to see, in oil on canvas, the images conjured by Tweets such as:

Capri-sun tweet

View Scottish Twitter’s geographical variety on our map:

Scottish twitter map

Hear Scots tweets translated into a foreign language (English) through our "educational" translator:

Scots tweet translator

Visit our recreation of a Gran’s flat: a shrine to the matriarch of the community, the queen of our hearts and the maw ay oor maws:

Gran's flat at the information centre

Marvel at the stained glass window of the patron saint of #ScottishTwitter, Lewis Capaldi:

Lewis Capaldi stained glass window

Immerse yourself in our multisensory area, inhaling the sweet scent of shower milk while reading:

Multisensory area

And, of course, visitors to the centre could pick up a souvenir at our free gift shop. How about a t-shirt?

Spiceboy Juggernaut t-shirt in the gift shop

Visit #ScottishTwitter redefined how we think about marketing. Not only did the team smash our targets, we succeeded in creating an experience that was genuinely loved and celebrated by people, authentic to their voices and the platform, and true to the conversation.

Leslie Berland, CMO, Twitter
Results

Twitter were delighted by the results. Why? Because Visit #ScottishTwitter authentically represented the conversation online, and stayed true to the community, with every single detail rooted in a real tweet. It overdelivered on the buzz, PR and footfall objectives, and was proudly shared be leading members of the community

• Visit #ScottishTwitter took off online. Our welcome video received 10.7m views, 23k views and 4k retweets, and made it organically to the Reddit homepage with 39k upvotes.

• Photos of the visitor centre took off on Twitter, with leading tweeters in the #ScottishTwitter community popping down to pose by their installations.

• Twitter recorded an overwhelmingly positive response (98% positive sentiment*), with their own takeover adding 10k followers and 23m impressions. #ScottishTwitter started trending, with 1688% increase in use. Scottish brands like Tennents, Irn Bru and Scotrail joined in the fun, and @LewisCapaldi himself retweeted.

• 177 pieces of coverage including almost complete range of UK outlets: Scottish Sun (full page with photos), Daily Record (full page with photos), Metro, MailOnline, Guardian, Times, i newspaper, BBC News online

• Almost 4000 people and a goat (it’s the Fringe!) visited the Centre over five days, contributing a constant background hum of giggles and guffaws.