The Pancake Day Campaign Revealed

If you follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook or live in Cardiff, you probably saw a lot of us in the days leading up to Pancake Day. We wanted to experiment, to do something we’ve never done before; and so we served up our #flippingoodvideo Pancake Day campaign.

What we wanted to achieve…

The objectives of our experiential campaign were simple; we wanted to do something nice for our clients and to create a live, memorable and interactive brand experience that would build lots of positive emotions with our audiences and to show everyone who we are. We’re a fun, social company who take pride in our approach to treating our clients like friends and family; we pour this ethos into our projects and will always go the extra mile with our service.

We love Pancake Day, everyone can enjoy pancakes! It’s fun, social and of course, it’s an excuse to stuff your face with pancakes! During the Christmas period, you see a lot of brands launching specific campaigns on social media, sending Christmas cards and creating festive content. We didn’t want to do what everyone else does, we decided to be different and so threw ourselves into a much less obvious key calendar date: Pancake Day.

What we did…

We integrated a number of elements into the campaign with the core being, naturally, video. We produced a YouTube video starring our very own Jamie Oliver, Lloyd Morgan, who shows viewers how to create the classic pancake. Recipe videos are really popular, with many people taking to YouTube to search how they can cook a particular dish. It’s surprising how many people don’t know how to make their own pancakes and we knew it would be a popular search, cue the creation of our pancake recipe.

The video was promoted on our social media channels (Twitter, Facebook and YouTube) We tied this is in with some exciting deliveries being made around Cardiff to encourage our friends and clients to get involved; so we sent out pancake kits and recipe postcards all linked to our video, encouraging participation and engagement. Pinterest was another tool that we used to reach the masses, creating a board specifically for pancakes, including our recipe video.

We also constructed a five day social media plan to aid the content that we had developed, which included a mix of fun, team-related and conversational posts. This included the setup of Twitter, Facebook and YouTube advertising, to help us achieve our goal of reaching a high volume of people and directing traffic to our video. We were also running a competition to win Pancake Day kits, encouraging people to get involved with the fun and make the effort to engage with us.

So, what happened?

As soon as postcards hit desks, we were inundated with tweets, comments and engagements; exactly as we’d hoped. Although this was a hyper-local campaign, we found that the campaign was reaching a much wider geographical span that we had anticipated! We had competition entries from London, the South West and in the Northern regions too. Of course, a lot of said entrants were entering many Pancake Day related competitions, however still using our hashtag! This is testament to the power of social media and how far it can travel, perhaps without your intention. We had 150 individual people interact with us and our hashtag on social media, smashing our original goal of 100.

 The most notable result of the campaign was its PR & marketing value; the uniqueness of the campaign was the experiential element; we’ve grown our audience and had some great feedback from clients, friends and new audiences. The BEST praise is when you’re told by someone that they wish they’d thought of it!

The video was undoubtedly the showstopper of this campaign; our YouTube ads reached a grand number of 19,460 impressions.

There were two clear goals of the campaign.  Do something fun for our clients and secondly to reach a wide local audience with something different, giving us brand recognition and raising our profile.

The combination of video, social media advertising, direct mail and a competition worked perfectly – it has set a precedent for future campaigns and has turned into something that we’re really proud of!

– Lloyd Morgan, our Managing Director.

We hope you enjoyed seeing a different side to us, we promise not to say any more about pancakes until next February!