The Mayhem Sale was an exceptional success.

• Every one of the 200+ items sold out in seconds from the ecommerce site, with each new item causing a massive surge in website traffic.

• The effort was noticed instantly – through real time social feeds, digital display and broadcast – and The Mayhem Sale hashtag jumped into the #1 trending topic position on twitter, both in the U.S. and globally.

• The massive sharing and retweeting resulted in 78 million social impressions in hours, turning an unknown issue into a top news story with another 160 million PR impressions.

• The initiative not only achieved its immediate sales goal of the 200 items, it also improved consumer attitudes significantly enough to turn into real purchasing action. The Mayhem sale contributed to an unprecedented 15% sales lift instantly and carried into an 18% sales lift for the month. All in all, this one-day promotional event led to the best January of home insurance policy sales in a decade.

So far, we had one single data point driving an idea, but we still needed to identify a couple of things before we could make it a reality:

1) The true severity of this problem, i.e. how far reaching someone’s social media activity can be

2) A time and place to reach this segment, in a way that brought the problem to life. We had to be jarring and attention-grabbing, but without being hyperbolic.

First, we unearthed two statistics that truly highlighted that magnitude of the risk. What we found is that the average Facebook users extended network (i.e. friends of friends) is 114,244 people. Worse yet, over half of online Americans don’t know what a privacy policy is! That means people are unintentionally putting powerful information at the hands of 114,244 “friends”. (http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/12/04/half-of-americans-dont-know-what-a-privacy-policy-is/)

We then looked to find when social media users are most prolific, and were able to pinpoint sporting events as being amongst the top 3 reasons for surges in social media. This helped us identify where to place our message, given the frequency with which people tweeting about being away from their home, either attending a game or a viewing party.

By putting this data together, we created the Mayhem Sale. During this one-time event, held in a 4-hour window during the Sugar Bowl broadcast, Mayhem the character broke into the house of a couple attending the game. During the course of the game, Mayhem put over 200 of their personal items up for sale on an online pop-up website, everything from a stapler to a car, and urged people to buy these items. In exchange for consumers taking advantage of these too good to be true offers, Allstate generated sales leads and delivered messaging promoting insurance policy sales by demonstrating the potential insurance hazards of oversharing on social media.