What started off as a viral cryptic marketing campaign from BBDO Canada, has now developed into a feel-good campaign of high-fives and smiles, sent your way whenever you made a small purchase with your Visa card and shared the news on Twitter.
After Visa announced that they were behind this campaign, they rolled out additional television spots and advertising during the 2013 NHL Playoffs, with small purchases being the talk on Twitter, and many professional athletes chiming in. But how could you make a campaign go beyond different? Well this is how Visa and BBDO went about that:
- Sharing tweets with “How was your #smallenfreuden today?” to Twitter users.
- Engaging in cryptic conversation using the campaign motto “#smallenfreuden” as a verb.
- Linking this to their campaign’s touchpoints, keeping “smallenfreuden” present as a verb to a cryptic action.
- Creating a series of videos during NHL Playoffs: “#smallenfreuden Small Play of The Game.” (The average Small Play of The Game video got +/- 100 views on YouTube, is this enough?)
- After they announced that smallenfreuden stood for the joy of small purchases, they engaged on social media with users who were making small purchases.
- They partnered with influencers to distribute smallenfreuden prize packs. After all, there’s always “small joy” in winning free prepaid Visa cards.
- When the campaign’s exposure finally reached the level they were hoping for, they were sending #smallenfreuden mugs to Twitter users. They personalized each tweet with uploading a photo of the mug and a personal note, including the user’s name on each one. They even managed to throw in a pack of fridge magnets as well for me! (See my interaction with them here)
As I wrote in my first post about this campaign, I was eager to see how they developed the campaign, after they announced the meaning behind #smallenfreuden so early. My concern was whether or not they had gathered enough momentum behind their cryptic noun to support their campaign. The momentum they gained was significant, and to turn a hashtag into a verb – that has social media success written all over it.
The @smallenfreuden Twitter account has new been converted to Visa’s new Canadian account, @VisaCA. See my Vine of the package I received from them below 
Follow @michaelcacho on Twitter.