How do you cut through the holiday clutter with a coupon promotion? Make a coupon no one has ever seen before, using a product they already love.

Instead of making a coupon with a simple bar code, we took Krispy Kreme’s famous glazer machine and made a perfect bar code out of pure, flowing Krispy Kreme glaze. We filmed fresh doughnuts rolling through the bar code glazer, and that video became a coupon that customers could scan right on their phones, directly from social media. The “World’s Tastiest Coupon” campaign was born – and with it, the world’s first scannable video.

Here’s an example (bit.ly/1X0FxXC) in a social environment. It’s likeable, it’s shareable, and it sold a lot of doughnuts.

Side note: This is not a project that could have been faked. Krispy Kreme’s factory engineers are versatile and creative, and Krispy Kreme was generous to let us borrow them.

Overall, the campaign was seen as a fantastic success from the standpoint of both marketing performance and business performance. We knew it struck a nerve when the offer trended on Facebook the day of the promotion. The “Day of the Dozens” Facebook post reach of users increased 109% year-over-year to 5.2 million, while organic video views increased a whopping 271% over 2014. Facebook event invites increased 68% from the previous year, and although it was not a primary goal, Facebook fans grew organically by 44K (a 143% increase over the same promotion in 2014).

Other results:

It was the second most engaged post on Instagram in December. In the world.

Twitter engagement went up 466%.

It engaged 12 million via organic reach on Facebook.

Krispy Kreme had a 83.5% sales increase over a typical December Saturday.