Pinterest was the breakaway social media platform of 2012, with millions of people “pinning” aspirational images of things they’d like to make or do. It skews female, which aligns with the target for the Honda CR-V.

We saw an opportunity to launch Honda as one of the first automakers on Pinterest, connect with the CR-V’s female target, and position Honda as an innovative brand. But with a budget of only $2,500, we needed an idea disruptive enough that it could be spread entirely through PR and word of mouth.

We realized that people were spending large amounts of time on Pinterest. Its addictive nature is written about by news outlets like ABC News, Mashable, and The Washington Post, among others.

The CR-V campaign is all about getting out and living life to the fullest. So we launched Honda on Pinterest by asking people to get off Pinterest. We targeted five of the most influential pinners, with 5 million followers among them, and offered them $500 to take a 24-hour break from the addictive social network so they could get out and actually DO what they were pinning about. We called it a #Pintermission.

The campaign succeeded in getting pinners away from their monitors, and the combination of targeting influencers, utilizing a hot new social network, and taking a counter-intuitive approach was widely successful in the press, earning Honda over 40 million PR impressions in one month.

Pinterest is addictive. The CR-V is about getting out and living. So how could we get people away from their monitors?

Since Pinterest does not offer any paid advertising, we had to find a new way to disseminate our message. We targeted five of the most active, influential pinners, with about 5 million followers among them, and offered them each $500 to take a 24-hour Pinterest break to get outside and make some of their pins real. We would use their networks of followers and earned media to get the word out.

We also encouraged other users to take a #Pintermission of their own by creating tongue-in-cheek inspirational posters about getting out and living. For example, “I spend hours pinning inspirational quotes about not letting life pass me by. (Whoops, I may need a #Pintermission.)”

Our goals for the campaign were to position Honda as an innovative company and gain recognition for being an early adopter of this new platform (measured through comments, blog posts, tweets and media coverage), and to encourage pass-along and interaction with our content (measured through followers, repins, likes and comments for each board).

The effort succeeded in not only getting pinners away from their monitors, but also generated over 40m PR impressions in one month. News coverage from Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, Forbes, MSN Autos, AOL Auto Blog and others praised Honda as an innovative early adopter of the platform.

Our #Pintermission boards got over 4.6m interactions, in the form of follows, likes, comments, and repins. And the buzz extended well beyond the boards of Pinterest as conversations moved organically to Twitter and Facebook. NBCUniversal reported the initiative led to an 83% increase in buzz among female consumers. All this with a cost of only $2,500.