In a category cluttered with price wars and competitive reactionary advertising, our goal was to separate DIRECTV from its competitors and elevate it to a more premium space as the ultimate viewing experience. Enter a charismatic Russian Oligarch who "likes the best," but also likes "savings the money." The character personified DIRECTV’s seemingly contradictory positioning: an unrivalled premium product at an unbelievable value.

It didn’t take long for the Russian billionaire and his petite lap giraffe to take off. It started on TV. Then it hit Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and the red carpet at the MTV Video Music Awards. Forbes did a profile mistaking him for a real billionaire. Then the campaign spawned a literal overnight sensation in petitelapgiraffe.com. Retail meet branding. Price-cutting meet premium. Huge sales meet huge pop culture buzz.

The campaign began on TV with “Opulence.” An immediate hit with pop culture, it quickly started a wildfire on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter and became a MEME that had everyone from ESPN and the nightly news to the neighbours talking about it and imitating it. We kept the momentum going by having the Oligarch appear on the red carpet at the MTV Video Music Awards. A stunt that actually landed the Oligarch on the Forbest.com billionaire list. We then continued to blur the lines of fantasy and reality by creating a breeder site for the much-loved petite lap giraffe seen in the commercial. Petitelapgiraffe.com featured a 24 hour live giraffe cam, a working 1-800 number (over 2,000 calls per day), and a section where you could get on the waiting list for the next breeding and then share the news with your friends via Facebook and Twitter.

Within 48 hours of "Opulence" airing, we had 500,000 views on YouTube plus everyone from Tony Cornheiser to our neighbours talking about it. Consumers’ quick and enthusiastic response lifted DIRECTV away from their competitors’ world and into the world of pop culture. After a month, DIRECTV’s Brand Buzz Index score increased 5.6 times.

Capitalizing on this success, we launched petitelapgiraffe.com. In just over a week, and with zero media dollars, the site had more than 10 million views from over 185 countries and the waitlist for a petite lap giraffe had swelled to over 700,000. Over 3 million visitors spent an average of 2.5 minutes per visit looking at the site’s every page. And within 24 hours of launch, CNBC picked up the story, stating it was "taking over the web" and relayed DIRECTV’s very real growth: 4.1 million gross subscribers and 9% increase in revenue over the previous year.