In early January, a man is found naked in the background of a children’s picture of the first e- retailer website in France: La Redoute.fr. Obviously this was not done on purpose but was a mistake made during the photo shoot. The unexpected fail has quickly been removed from the website, but it was too late. In less than 4 hours, the naked man became the 2nd most tweeted topic in the world. Everyone talked about la redoute’s mistake. Facing this crisis communication, how should la Redoute react? We decided to react quickly and twist this bad buzz into a good buzz. We launched a hunted fake fails game on their website, initiated by a corporate video. 14 fake fails were hidden among 33 600 pictures on the website la redoute.fr. In less than 48 hours, La redoute had taken back the control on its e-reputation.

Once we decided to react, we knew that we needed to answer to our target audience where the story initially began (social networks).We launched a hunted fake fails game on la Redoute’s website. This fail hunt was introduced by a corporate video posted on social networks. This video invited Internet users to search for 14 fake fails among the 33,600 pictures on the website la redoute.fr. Once we had posted the corporate video on YouTube, we spread the news on la Redoute’s Facebook and Twitter account (a Wednesday at 4 pm, a high traffic moment on la Redoute’s social media account), and simultaneously made visible the 14 fake fails on la Redoute’s website. We gave guidelines to la Redoute’s community manager to give some clue and engage even more people to share the YouTube’s video.

The objective was to take back the control of La Redoute’s e-reputation, and that is what we did among our target audience but also to people who know the brand and care for it from near and far.

We won since the beginning of the operation 100,000 fans on Facebook and generated numerous positive topics on this specific operation.

The video had 220,000 views in less than 48 hours, and during the operation the traffic increased of 70%. We did not invest a dime in media, neither had a press release as this video was our ambassador, but as the bounce back was smart enough we had 1,200 press articles, and a $1,069,000 earned media.