How do you create buzz around a pastry that has tasted the exact same for over 100 years, and is sold at thousands of other places? Yes, Swedes love cinnamon buns, and on National Cinnamon Bun Day 2019, Pressbyrån (Sweden’s largest chain of convenience stores) had a goal of selling more cinnamon buns than ever before. And while many of our competitors spent their marketing budget on influencers we knew we needed to do something really special to set us apart. To do so, and to get people to choose our cinnamon buns, we launched a new advertising media and introduced the world’s first Eyefluencers.

To put it short we invented a whole new media channel by turning our employees into Eyefluencers. We created custom made contact lenses with a cinnamon bun motif and our cinnamon bun day offer. By letting the staff in our 320 stores wear the lenses, we turned them into Eyefluencers and put our offer right in the eyes of our customers. The lenses were worn on Cinnamon Bun Day and got major attention from all customers visiting our stores, and far beyond that. The Eyefluencers campaign was supported with social media, OOH, Print and film.

We knew we needed to come up with something spectacular in order to get attention around a product and a day that has a lot of competition. As our employees have always been the core in our customer meeting we wanted to make them part of the campaign to be able to reach the fika-crazed swedes. The Eyefluencers stood in contrast to other influencer campaigns, with the tongue-in-cheek tonality and approach to the subject. The campaign was spread through an integrated campaign and by processing the press. But mostly, we managed to come up with a new, very eye catching way, to talk about a products that has been around for centuries.

The lenses were custom made and had to be crafted in a way that our customers would be able to see both the cinnamon bun and the price tag. When the lenses were created every store got them, and we also rolled out an integrated campaign showing the mesmerizing effects of looking into the eyes of employees with cinnamon bun lenses in their eyes. With a large chunk of humour we managed to built up a hype around our Eyefluencers and became the most talked about store during the week leading up to cinnamon bun day.

Some were shocked, others loved it. The campaign was widely debated on social media making us the most talked about brand in Sweden during these days. Major news media (TV, Print and online) picked up the campaign, calling it “a stroke of genius”. Whatever people thought about turning our employees into Eyefluencers, the campaign was written about in major news media both nationally and internationally, asking if this is the marketing channel of the future. And the cinnamon bun record? We beat it by thousands. All this, simply by making eye contact with our customers.