Our task was to connect Jolly Rancher’s “Keep on sucking” philosophy with an iconic sucky holiday: Valentine’s Day. There are plenty of reasons why it sucks, but we zeroed in on a notoriously sucky part: Valentine’s gifts. For our audience, young Millennials and college students, Valentine’s gifts mean shelling out money they don’t have on short-lived romantic relationships, or being single and seeing everyone else’s gifts on social media.

To encourage our audience to “Keep on sucking!” we made our own sucky, sparkly, Valentine’s jewelry and gave it away for free online. The absurd collection of jewelry was made of 14k gold and silver chains with plastic Jolly Rancher candy gems—the ideal last minute Valentine’s gift.

We promoted the jewelry pieces on social media and engaged with users whenever they posted about Valentine’s Day. To win a piece of jewelry users had to Tweet about a Valentine’s gift giving nightmare.

The Jolly Rancher Jewelry collection became the centerpiece to an integrated social media campaign that included a lookbook on Facebook, Instagram stories, a shopping QVC TV-like Instagram Live, tie-ins with influencers on Snapchat and Instagram (influencers: Olivia Sui, Leli Hernandez, Jeff Wittek, and Manon Matthew), and tons of posts and social content we used as fodder for conversations and interactions between the brand, fans, and anyone talking about Valentine’s Day on social (through a social media war room approach).

The entire collection was explorable on Hershey’s website, too.

And through a Twitter sweepstake, we encouraged fans to share their worst Valentine’s gift stories with #ValentinesDaySucks and sent the best ones a much better Valentine’s gif this time around: a Jolly Rancher Jewelry.

The Jolly Rancher Jewelry campaign brought Jolly Rancher front and center in online conversation. The campaign resulted in 200,000 overall engagements, across Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, 130 million earned Impressions across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and through press articles. There was a 31% increase in brand mentions and a

311% increase time spent on the Jolly Rancher website, meaning users spent an average 8 more minutes browsing through our jewelry on the site compared to when there was just candy on the site. We also drove earned media in the days leading up to the campaign, going live with the story on the 12th and concluding on the 14th, we ended up driving 74.2MM impressions and 30 placements both online and on TV.