Case Study: WheresTheSticker

When the Food Standards Agency looked to encourage restaurant goers to seek out its green ratings stickers in restaurant windows, Threepipe came up with “thumb stopping” video content to hijack the high levels of  “#foodporn” on social media. Video clips featured a cockroach emerging from a steak sandwich and a bloody plaster surfacing on a bowl of soup.

Campaign: WheresTheSticker
Client: Food Standards Agency (FSA)
PR Team: Threepipe
Timing:
Budget: £25,001 – £50,000

Objectives

The FSA wanted to increase consumer awareness of its Food Hygiene Rating Scheme (FHRS) and to encourage restaurant goers to seek out the green ratings sticker in restaurant windows.

To work, the campaign needed to create engaging, sharable content to impact an audience that frequently eats out, achieve over 5.6 million impressions across Facebook and Instagram, and drive traffic to the FHRS website.

Target audience:

Men and women, aged 35 to 55-years-old in England, who eat out more than other age groups.

Strategy

Given the audience’s high usage of Facebook, coupled with its sophisticated targeting options, Threepipe recommended it as the primary platform. To get the word out as economically and effectively as possible within our target audience, we focused on a paid strategy promoting engaging content. That way, we could continually optimise our approach throughout the campaign and ensure that our specific audience was engaging with the content.

We wanted to create ‘thumb-stopping’ content not seen previously in this area of government regulation. We developed a series of innovative and engaging cinemagraphs that were designed to shock and illicit an emotional response. This would encourage sharing of the content and drive the audience to seek more information about the FHRS – both by going online and also looking for the green sticker when visiting a restaurant.

We decided to capitalise on all of the incredible “#foodporn” across social media, but with an original approach. The cinemagraphic creative were set up beautifully, but as they appear to loop, it revealed some shocking unhygienic aspect to the unsuspecting viewer. For example, a cockroach emerged from behind a beautiful steak sandwich and a bloody plaster floats to the surface of a steaming bowl of soup.

This elevated FSA into the foodie lifestyle realm but with a special twist. The video encouraged users to think about what’s touching their food before it goes onto their plate. By creating this unique take on an emerging creative approach, it ensured our content would be highly sharable and a key discussion point.

Over the course of the month’s campaign we, built 32 campaigns, 82 advert sets and 1,332 adverts, which allowed us to granularly optimise the delivery of the creative and copy to the specific audiences.

Results

The campaign delivered over 8.3 million impressions across Facebook and Instagram, surpassing our KPI by 47%. With a unique reach of over 2.3 million people, we engaged with a significant portion of our key audience through Facebook.

The most revealing metric, which showed we truly impacted the audience with our creative, was the 1.3 million views to the end slate of the cinemagraph, representing 47% of all views. That showed that our content hooked the audience and kept them engaged enough to watch the majority of the video, reaching the brand’s message and giving consumers the opportunity to take a social action.

Got a cracking campaign – with impressive results – that you’d like to showcase? If so, please email [email protected].