TwitterScrabble, a Twitter only game, as a solution to introduce Scrabble Trickster, makes the Scrabble brand less old-fashioned and engages the Scrabble community in a completely new way, using nothing but social media and PR.So we set out to solve a new product launch and a brand rejuvenating issue with a PR-approach by getting friends, followers and press to share and talk about it, with no paid media at all.

We’ve created TwitterScrabble. A social idea and a whole new contemporary way to get people engaged in the Scrabble game. Purely via Twitter, because for a new Scrabble game based on limited characters, what better than the idea to launch a Twitter based Scrabble challenge? The gameplay is simple: write the highest scoring tweet with a set of 100 random characters. Once you’ve nailed it, you hit the ‘Tweet’ button which posts your Scrabbletweet to the entire Twitterverse. Every day the highest scoring Scrabbletweet wins the new board game ‘Scrabble Trickster’.

People wrote thousands and thousands of Scrabbletweets, and Twitterscrabble instantly became talk of the Twittertown. For several weeks TwitterScrabble and Scrabble trickster became a trending topic, resulting in a gross reach of over 5m people on Twitter only. (In Belgium that is a huge result.) TwitterScrabble was by far the best (and cheapest) Mattel product launch so far, without using any paid media. Today people are still Scrabbletweeting. So it is clear that the idea survives long after the actual game launch is over. ‘TwitterScrabble’ got covered in all major media-channels and blogs in Belgium, each not merely reporting about the game, but reporting about the fact that TwitterScrabble proves that Scrabble is ready for life in the digital age. (Goal 2: Make the brand less old-fashioned).

We clearly managed to generate and leverage PR-value to solve a brand and product launch challenge in 1 campaign