Trolls.

Piers Morgan.

Trump.

Twitter doesn’t have it easy when it comes to securing positive media coverage. That’s why our ongoing retained brief is to sniff out the @people using Twitter in a positive, engaging and entertaining way and shine a light on them, from the couple who designed their wedding vows to fit within 280 characters to the most liked ‘Golden Tweet’ during the World Cup.

Our Christmas campaign objective: locate the individual on Twitter that best personifies what Christmas is all about and tell their story.

There’s a guy called John Lewis. He’s a lecturer at Virginia Tech. And he’s the proud owner of the @JohnLewis Twitter handle.

Every year, John Lewis (the man) patiently and humorously responds to the tweets he receives intended for his retailer namesake - John Lewis is one of the biggest retailers in the UK.

So, we slid into John’s DMs, and shot the most meta ad of the year: an ad about John Lewis, parodying John Lewis retail ads, starring a guy called John Lewis designed to jump on the conversation already going on in the UK about the John Lewis ad.

Our bullseye target audience are urban professionals, 20 – 40, who get social media, consume online news.

But how to reach them at Christmas, the most cluttered, impenetrable time of the year? We needed a universal – something that our audience all talk about in the run up to Christmas, something that all media write about and something that also gets huge traction on Twitter…

Every Christmas the UK collectively waits with bated breath for the John Lewis spot and subsequently races to Twitter to analyse, deconstruct and answer the question, “But was it better than last year’s?” Last year it trended for days…

Our strategy was therefore: hijack the national pastime of debating the John Lewis ad so as to deliver a message about how great conversation happens on Twitter.

This is the simple bit.

On 19th of November, @JohnLewis simply tweeted the film.

Within minutes, it had broken the internet.

We'd already lined up loads of interviews for John in advance. Nevertheless, by lunchtime on Day 1, we weren't so much selling in as we were fielding dozens of inbound calls from national media, all of whom wanted to find out more...

This was an ‘ad’ with zero media spend.

Obligatory reach figure: 1.48 billion.

3 million organic views on Twitter, plus 2 million on other platforms.

Coverage in every UK national. We trended on Twitter (would have been a bit embarrassing if we hadn’t, tbf). Elton John tweeted about it.

The actual important bit: it was impossible for any outlet to cover our campaign without telling the story of a man who uses Twitter in an incredibly kind and incredibly entertaining way, our exact ongoing brief.