To shake up an overly-pragmatic category — salad dressing — we decided the best way to get women excited about dressing was by UNdressing a sexy chef. So we created The Zesty Guy. He’s the host of a cooking show set in Tuscany, and though he might not really be a culinary expert (per se) he can melt butter with his charm and somehow manages to lose his shirt while cooking. This campaign was written by women, for women, and we only had one thing on our minds: getting women zesty.

We tantalized millions of women in just one night using breakthrough social media stunts and the half-naked body of @TheZestyGuy. His flirtatious invitation “Let’s Get Zesty” launched with custom contextually-relevant commercials on prime-time Bravo, leading up to a live appearance on Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen.

We put together a digital dream team including strategists, comedy writers, designers, community managers, and a team filming The Zesty Guy on the fly. They scoured the social media landscape for opportunities to engage our target. Even client and legal approvals were being made in real-time.

The result was over 300 high-quality, personalized interactions via tweets, videos, images, and custom meme-like ecards called 'Zestygrams'. Every response happened in under 10 minutes, with an emphasis on targeting the most influential users within our demographic.

As a result, we multiplied the exposure of the campaign by 10x during its most relevant moment — without spending a single additional dollar in paid media.

The night of the campaign launch, three separate teams in three cities activated the plan in real-time. In Los Angeles, a team of social media strategists, community managers, planners and account teams scanned the social media space and pushed messaging as our Bravo audience watched the episodes, TV spots and the live appearance. They watched a satellite feed to respond to east coast broadcasts and their work continued into the night to coincide with west coast air times. In Chicago, account team, media teams and client teams managed immediate approvals and promoted appropriate conversation posts to stoke the fire. In New York, PR and creative teams worked with Bravo and The Zesty Guy to ensure the live appearance went just right. All the while, digital media turned on homepage takeovers, online video feeds, Youtube search and paid search to ensure our message was unmissable to our target.

- Output/Awareness: i.e. change in consumer awareness and attitude

(survey), overall impressions, target audience impressions, article counts/

placements, content views (e.g. video or presentation).

- Over 250,000 Youtube views in 24 hours, 1 million video views on Youtube, as of 4/8/13 (within one week of launch)

- 9,702,596 media/PR impressions as of 4/5/13

- Organic social impressions – 1.56 million

- Facebook reach 7.5 million (up from from 27k pre-launch)

- +5% sales increase of the dressing portfolio

- +20% increase of Zesty Italian at WalMart

- Knowledge/Consideration: i.e. key message penetration, coverage depth,

dominance, prominence, ratio of favourable to unfavourable mentions

in traditional and social media, changes in NPS (Net Promoter Score)/

likelihood to recommend (survey), purchase intent (survey).

- Positive sentiment – 85% as of 4/8/13 (Netbase)

- Unpaid/earned media news pick-up and interview segments on Good

Morning America, E! News and Fox And Friends