Our answer to the question how to raise Chester’s profile? Have him run for office. Since it seems anyone can run for American political office—even reality-TV stars—why not have Chester run for mayor? No, really—mayor of Chester, Montana, of course. “Chester for Chester” was an integrated multiplatform campaign that proved that no candidate can run as a cheetah can run.

From early October right up until the mayoral election day in November, Chester tweeted daily—sometimes more than once—with campaign updates and attacks against Noel Walston. We created campaign launch videos, attack ads (one even for Noel to use), free political swag and hip-hop remixes of Chester’s speeches; we had him live-tweet during the Republican and Democratic presidential debates to make him seem even more credible as a candidate, one who knows how to talk about the issues. We even had Chester debate human mayor Noel on local Montana television. We gave our candidate a national platform to extend earned interest both in and outside Montana—the Orange Party. We encouraged constituents—media, celebrities and consumers—to “Show Us Their Orange” in support of Chester. All the hallmarks of an actual political campaign, distributed in a little over one month’s time.

Our ad/political campaign earned the kind of results that would have put a puppet into political office, if that kind of thing were actually legally allowed:

- Nearly 600 million earned media impressions

- Almost 5,000 placements blanketed the news

- 15.8 million impressions from social influencers

- More than 4,300 national, local and social placements

- In October three times more Twitter followers than our monthly average

We even managed to convince Noel Walston, who would go on to win the race, to paint an orange crosswalk on Main Street in Chester, Montana, in Chester Cheetah’s honor.