In this surprising follow-up to “Three Little Pigs”, we have leveraged The Guardian’s ability for satire and self-deprecation.

The brief set time-bound, ambitious commercial targets to increase sales of the weekend papers in January, in spite of a price rise, and in a category that had been declining 13% each year.

In order to deliver against the task whilst retaining The Guardian’s witty and smart tone of voice, the idea was to expose and satire the conventions of the ‘hard sell’. The campaign premise is that the paper’s weekend coverage is so comprehensive, that they effectively “own the weekend”, and are therefore, literally, entitled to trademark the best part of the week.

The campaign started in press with the official announcement that The Guardian had trademarked the week™, with a patent certificate and legal letter. We followed up with a film, a spoof action-movie trailer—introduced by Hugh Grant.

The hero format was released online via video seeding and search. The bulk of the media investment focused on the three weekends of January following the Christmas break, targeting our audience whilst they were in a “weekend” mindset, with 60”/30” cuts of the film aired on cinema screens on Friday and Saturday nights.

We also created print executions obnoxiously labelling typical weekend photos. These ran in press and as digital escalator panels to target Friday commuters.

For the final weekend, we called out Twitter users who dared to infringe our trademark, and ran a three quarter paper wrap in The Guardian, detailing all the reasons why your weekend is now, effectively, ours.

Online, the creative generated 62% ad recall from visitors to guardian.co.uk during the campaign period. It spread organically through social channels, generating 24m Twitter impressions and 1.4m Youtube views in less than 3 weeks. Overall 64% of our weekend readers were aware of the campaign after 4 weeks.

The campaign delivered our commercial objective of a 2% sales uplift year on year, in spite of a price rise and in a category in steep structural decline. Over the course of January and February 2013 alone, weekend paper sales delivered upwards of £1m over target.