Every bank holiday is the same. Offers, promotions and named-brand noise. Everywhere. And with our customers often trading up for the occasion, we knew it would be hard to be heard in the conversation.

So, while everyone was talking about the big brands, we got the big brands to talk about us.

Turning on our Out Of Office and going off to have fun, with one simple tweet we invited brands across the UK to cover our shift – and they all jumped at the chance, with over 40 household brands getting involved.

From social giants like KFC, innocent and Specsavers to British institutions like Polo, Dominos and Heinz. And even some competitors too. We sat back, relaxed, and let them do our job for us, racking up over 140k engagements and 5.1 million impressions without lifting a finger or spending a single penny.

When you know that your customers trade up to ‘treat themselves’ to all the named brands on special occasions, what do you do to get yourself at the front of their mind when the bank holiday rolls around? Spend millions on advertising? Create a big budget TV spot? Enlist the help of an A-List celeb?

No. You do absolutely nothing.

In just one tweet we declared we weren’t working this bank holiday and asked all of twitter (including our competitors) to cover the Monday shift. And as it happened, they all jumped at the chance, with over 40 of those ‘special treat’ named-brands wanting to do our job for us.

Apparently less really does do more.

We knew that every public holiday, customers trade up and trade out to competitors. Thanks to our simple but brilliant execution, the PR strategy was simple - while everyone was talking about the big brands, we got the big brands to talk about us.

We needed to be reactive, working closely with the team manning the social channels to see what response each post got and to maximise the buzz when took off. Our approach was to play back the success of the social channel activation, allowing Aldi’s brand fans across social and online media to report on the campaign’s success themselves in a more natural and authentic way, just how the campaign grew to begin with.

Our campaign had a single goal, to get as many brands to tweet about us as possible so the execution needed to be just as simple. Starting the week before the bank holiday weekend, we kicked it off with just one tweet asking brands to cover our Monday shift.

It didn’t take long before the replies started and when they did, our reactive team jumped on it, replying to every single brand quote retweeting their response with some classic Aldi humour.

Then when it all began to grow, we started poking at the even bigger fish, crafting tweets specifically aimed at the likes of KFC, Specsavers and Gymshark, even calling out our mates at Pretty Little Thing for not answering our calls.

What resulted was a feed of 40+ brands wanting a bit of the action and DMs full of social teams providing tweets for us to use come

This whole campaign was centred around other brands as we know our customers turn to them to trade up, so our biggest result was how many named-brands got involved to talk about Aldi – and it was a lot.

Over 40 household brands jumped onboard including Microsoft, Currys, Unidays, Milky Bar, and Heinz. We also managed to attract some of the biggest brands on the platform such as Specsavers, Dominos, Innocent, MyProtein, Pretty Little Thing and Yorkshire Tea who have a combined follower count over 1.5 million. Even our competitors couldn’t resist with the likes of Co-op and Morrison’s getting involved too.

And all that brand chatter clearly worked, with over 140,000 engagements and a reach of 5.1 million in just a two-day period.

That campaign didn’t just live on twitter either, its results went much further, stretching to other social platforms and gaining earned media across the press.