During the US presidential campaign, Mitt Romney’s senior advisor used an interesting analogy for Romney’s fall campaign plans. On CNN, he said, “It’s almost like an Etch A Sketch. You can kind of shake it up, and we start all over again.”

That statement set off a media storm, confirming some people’s view that Romney was a flip-flopper, and it put us to work on an intelligent response campaign that included posters, a complete social media overhaul, limited-edition packaging, yard signs, T-shirts, and even turning EtchASketch.com into a polling station of sorts.

All the while, Etch A Sketch remained firmly apolitical.

We began by creating a series of posters, each making a political commentary. The headlines took an apolitical stance, with headlines that read “Etch a Sketch is a lot like politics. There’s a lot of gray area.” And “We have a right knob and a left knob for each political party. (But remember, when both work together we can do loop-de-loops.”

Then, we turned our attention to Facebook and Twitter, using social media to crack one-liners galore. We also created commemorative edition Etch a Sketches—one the traditional red, the other blue.

Using EtchASketch.com as a hub, we then kept the conversation going online. People who logged onto the website could choose red or blue and register vote in the November 2012 election.

The campaign quickly went viral. Numerous blogs, news sources and trade journals picked up the work, telling the world of Etch A Sketch’s apolitical messages. And Etch A Sketch saw a huge jump in the sales of their product, with an increase of 1,500%. Not bad for a campaign that didn’t spend a red cent in media.

The choice to jump into the political arena proved to be a wise one.