Shaggy dog story: Retailer replaces community manager with pug (and boosts visits by 150,000)

To stand out from the crowd during Chinese New Year, luxury online retailer Glamour Sales enlisted Fred&Farid to create a social media stunt to get tongues (and tails) wagging. By pretending to swap their community manager for a dog, the firm generated 100,000 new customers on a tiny budget. See why it’s our video viral of the week below…
Watch the video case study below:

Knowing that most of their existing customers search for promotional deals on Chinese microblogging site Sina Weibo, the agency posted a series of posts on the brand’s page consisting of random letters and numbers.
The goal was to bring 100,000+ traffic from Weibo to Glamour-sales Chinese New Year promotion pages.

The stunt garnered interest and comments such as “What wrong with the community manager?”, “He is so fired!”, “The Weibo account must have been hacked” and “The community manager must be really drunk.”
Following these seemingly random posts, the agency had a “key opinion leader” drop a planned post which read, “No way! Not only the Weibo account. Glamour Sales’ website seems to be hacked as well! The prices are so low!”
Once everyone headed over to the Glamour Sales website to scoop deals as low as $0.16. the brand then released the big reveal; a “security” video that showed just what had happened; GlamDog (the brand’s mascot) was somehow left in the sales office for the night and was allowed to get his paws on the brand’s social media accounts.
In just two days, the company generated 3million+ viewership, 22,167 reposts, 8,693 comments on Sina Weibo, and more than 150,000 visitors to the Glamour-sales Chinese New Year promotion websites.
1,500 new followers were recruited for brand Weibo account, and the total video views reached 123,000- all on a tiny budget.