Tesco mobile wanted to change its perception as an undesirable brand with little personality amongst a younger target audience. Their customers were embarrassed for being with the network. In short, Tesco Mobile had become a bit of a joke, especially on Twitter, and they wanted to be respected and have a strong social community.

So it was decided to tackle this head on showing the world that there’s nothing funny about Tesco Mobile on Twitter (where our target audience was most active). Our #nojoke campaign took a confident, ballsy, honest tone of voice. And in less than a year we’d won the hearts of the once haters.

The campaign was true social PR, using our community to co-create hilarious content and share via retweets, which was picked up and re-published across the world by some of the most influential publications like Buzzfeed and Fast Company, UK’s press The Metro to Australia’s Business Insider.

Our approach set the benchmark of how a corporate brand can succeed on Twitter and have a truly engaged community. We re-wrote the rulebook and increased our twitter community to 467%. Ultimately it injected some much needed personality and attitude into a brand that had felt a bit irrelevant. It was so successful Fast Company declared it one of the 20 best ads of 2013. And we generated 500,000 new customers during the campaign period. #NoJoke indeed!

Our confident, ballsy, honest real-time responses were brilliantly received. Two good examples:

Firstly, a girl named Liyah Summers tweeted us:

“When you call someone and it goes through to their Tesco Mobile Voicemail… LOOOOOOL”

We responded:

@LiyahSummers When you realise your mates are ignoring you LOOOOOOOOL #NoJoke

This resonated with our audience, with over 11,000 retweets and republished by some of the most influential online newsfeeds. She also changed her name to @TescoGirl!

The second exchange was dubbed ‘The best conversation you will read today’ by Buzzfeed, in which we bantered back and forth with @YorkshireTea, @RealJaffaCakes, @CadburyUK and @walkers_crisps.

As a result of our confident, ballsy, honest tone of voice and fast, targeted responses we won the hearts of the once haters to be named as one of the most social brands in the world. In fact, Fast Company named us Top 20 Ads of 2013. But more importantly, we grew our Twitter community by a huge 467%. we created 46% positive buzz compared to 02 (6%), EE (7%) and Three (11%), 6 million earned media impressions and staggering 500,000 new customers during the campaign period. We showed the world how a corporate brand can succeed on Twitter.