Online Retailer Enlists ‘Drunk Dog’ To Hack Social Account, Leading To 100K New Buyers

Oh how the lemmings do follow. For Chinese luxury online retailer Glamour Sales, Fred&Farid had a little bit of fun with JCPenney-style drunken tweets and a dog. During Chinese New Year, and with the knowledge that most people search for promotional deals on Chinese microblogging site Sine Weibo, the agency posted a series of posts on the brand’s  page consisting of random letters and numbers.

Of course, the stunt garnered the usual interest and comments such as “What wrong with the community manager?”, “He is so fired!”, “The Weibo account must have been hacked” and, yes, “The community manager must be really drunk.”

Following these seemingly drunk posts, the agency had a “key opinion leader” drop a planned post which read, “No way! Not only the Weibo account. Glamour Sales’ website seems to be hacked as well! The prices are so low!”

And, like the aforementioned lemmings, everyone headed over to the Glamour Sales website to check things out. The brand then released the big reveal; a “security” video that showed just what had happened and why all those crazy posts went out. Yup. It was GlamDog, the brand’s mascot who was somehow left in the Glamour Sales office for the night to have his way with the brand’s social media accounts.

Did the stunt work? According the case study video, yes. In two days, the posts received 21,657, 216 views, 22,167 reposts, 8,693 comments and 100,000 new buyers on the Glamour Sales website. Cheap stunt? Maybe. But the stunt was most certainly cheap… as in low budget. As in no budget. Of course, these sort of stunts will only work once.

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Steve Hall

Steve Hall is a marketing professional, publisher, writer, community manager, photographer and all-around lover of advertising.