Knowing that stress and tension are the leading cause of common headaches, by keeping an eye on culture and a finger on social listening, we found what was causing America stress and tension: the 2016 Presidential race.

When Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton faced off in the first of the debates, there was a lot of chat on social media about how headache-inducing the vitriol was.

While debate raged over the divisive candidates, there was one thing America agreed on: the election campaign was painful to watch. Social data and a 1,000 bespoke survey proved it: all the candidate trash-talking was giving Americans headaches. 73% of our respondents said they expected to get a headache from the election.

With the nation’s discomfort, our opportunity to recapture relevance emerged. We set about easing the pain of a nation the next time a headache was probable: the third and final Presidential debate.

The clients, media, PR, creative, legal and twitter banded together, and developed an all-day Twitter campaign called #DebateHeadache.

In essence, we bought out Twitter for the day of the third debate, October 19th, and sent out promoted tweets from when the anticipation (and possible despair) about the impending squabble began in the morning, to after the last punch had been thrown just before midnight.

#DebateHeadache powered on throughout the day. We sent cheeky but unbiased tweets, promoting Excedrin as the headache solution every time.

As the day progressed, more and more people responded to our efforts: retweets, posts, etc snowballed. We sparked a conversation in earned media through outreach leading up to – and during – the Twitter takeover. Coverage continued to trickle in across outlets and verticals in the days, weeks and months that followed, with stories continuing to appear leading up to the Presidential Inauguration in January 2017.

The cleverness and simplicity of the campaign got noticed: social media went nuts, with a 3,100% increase in brand chatter.

There were over 100,000 engagements with @Excedrin tweets and over 80,000 mentions of #DebateHeadache during the debate.

#DebateHeadache delivered 316 million impressions – 3x as many impressions the average Super Bowl ad, for less than 5% of the advertising cost.

We saw a one percentage point lift in market share in the week after the #DebateHeadache campaign, generating an incremental sales lift of more than 10% versus previous year.

Finally, Stephen Colbert named Excedrin the winner of the debate on his show that night – just one of many media outlets who published stories about this fast-thinking, topical campaign, including CNN, The Wall Street Journal, NBC News and Fox News.

Thanks to the headache-inducing bitterness, Excedrin recaptured relevance AND share among everyday headache sufferers.