We gave people a reason to follow Pepto, using the show that asked why anyone would follow us. Responding to the show, we posted a single tweet, giving Happyish fans a chance to watch Happyish on us. All they had to do to win? Follow Pepto.

Happyish premiered on the 27 April, 2015. During the premier, Pepto’s Twitter page was mentioned in a negative light. We used Twitter to respond, with a single tweet targeted at Happyish viewers who would inevitably visit our page due to the mention. The tweet incentivized Happyish viewers to follow Pepto, thus turning the negative sentiment into a positive. In addition, during the premier, we tracked Twitter mentions of Pepto and Happyish, re-directing conversation towards our campaign. And since we knew that networks like Showtime rerun their premiers for a week after launch, we continued to run the promotion, while monitoring and responding to conversation that whole week. Although the campaign consisted of just a single tweet and responses, the scale and reach was exponentially larger. We leveraged the popularity of Showtime, one of America’s biggest TV networks, to ensure our inexpensive Twitter promotion received more attention than the show itself.

With one tweet, we hijacked the social conversation around the launch of Happyish. In fact, if you searched for Happyish on twitter during the premier, you wouldn't find anything about the show. Because more people were sharing our idea than talking about the premier. This meant that, with one tweet, we increased Pepto's following by 27% and got 4.5 million impressions. And while Pepto was getting thousands of new followers, Happyish barely got 100. We also got traditional publicity, with publications like Forbes Magazine and The Oracle writing about the campaign, and Adweek calling us 1 of the 25 funniest brands to follow on Twitter. In summary, with one tweet, we turned a potentially negative publicity situation for Pepto, into the most successful social campaign the brand has undertaken, and got more social buzz than the premier of a new show on one of America's biggest TV networks.