In the US, reality TV shows (both broadcast and online) and brands are not strangers. Many big brands will add their names to a reality show in order to get their brand in front of a huge audience. However, no one was really involving the audience and making them a part of shows. Brands are commonly seen as just passive sponsors to content created by someone else.That’s why we wanted to create a live reality show that was not just brought to you by Craftsman, but whose very premise brought to life what Craftsman stood for and involved the audience directly in the outcome of the show.

Starting with the casting phase, we contacted bloggers to put the word out there that Craftsman was on the hunt for the most unhandy person in America.

Once we found our unhandy hero, Alan, and in order for the show to succeed, we needed to get a tool-savvy audience that could tune-in live and save Alan from himself.So again, we went to a wide range of bloggers asking for their help and the help of their followers. In some cases, we catered very specifically to the upcoming wilderness-task at hand.For instance, in one live-streaming event we knew Alan would have to repair an abandoned dune buggy. So in his training weeks we paired him up with NASCAR driver Kasey Kahne.So, while Alan got hands-on training with Kasey, Kasey was tweeting about Alan’s skills, tweets filled with pleas for his fans to tune-in live and help save Alan.

The main objective of this campaign was to increase the amount of Facebook fans for the 80 year-old Craftsman brand, and make the brand more relatable to a new generation of DIYers. In the 3 and 1/2 months of this project, Craftsman’s Facebook fans more than doubled from 350,000 to over 700,000. SCREW*D had over 30,000 viewers tune-in during the live streaming events. With episodes of the show resulting in over 4.5m online views. We had over 94m earned media impressions, and YouTube drove nearly 20,000 visits to the Craftsman YouTube page and over 11,000 visits to Craftsman.com, resulting in an increase of 15% in online sales.