GONE IN 60 SECONDS: Glassons’ Recent Fast-Paced Campaign

Kiwi womenswear label, Glassons, caught our attention recently with their #Glassonsfirstminute campaign.

The clever Instagram promotion saw The House of G giving its audience the chance to win prizes (a $50 voucher) if they commented the hashtag in – you guessed it – the first minute the photo was posted.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BfxiWj3gs87/

So what’s our verdict?

Basically, they should rename their business The House of G-enius because this is a clever wee tactic if we ever did see one. It ticks quite a few of our Boxes for Good Ideas.

Good Idea 1: Easy

Easy for both Glassons and their audiences. If you don’t count the photoshoots (which may or may not have been in either New York or London by the looks of things) and time to dream up the campaign, the competition is very straightforward and not too pricey for the business.

For Glassons: Post a photo and caption, pick a winner, send them a voucher. For the audience: Write a hashtag. None of those follow-27-different-businesses-and-comment-on-every-one-then-tag-each-one-while-also-mentioning-them-in-your-stories-and-signing-up-on-their-website type affairs. Social media competitions are most effective when they are simple for your audience.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BfxD4vRguYb/

Good Idea 2: Engaging

Depending on how competitive your audience is (and I know some Glassons-lovers who would have killed for a glimpse of Justin Bieber not too long ago) this competition has all the hallmarks of something which would grow a following, fast.

Whether they are checking your Instagram feed religiously to try and spot the right post or have turned on post notifications – you’ve got yourself a highly engaged audience. Considering some of the posts had close to 1000 comments – we’d say that one paid off.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BfxR2LFAhL2

Good Idea 3: Genuine

The competition rewards existing audience members, or those who will see the competition pop up through the engagement of their own networks (depending on what the algorithms are doing that day, of course). And considering Glassons have 222,000 followers on the ‘gram – there’s a fair few eyeballs going to be hit by some hasty hashtagging.

Competitions are a great way to attract new followers, and this one probably did, but offering too many rewards only for new followers can make your loyal brand-lovers feel a bit left out. So here, Glassons has delivered for everyone.

Good Idea 4: Original

We’ve seen some, but not too many competitions like this in our laps around the sun, so applaud the brand for showcasing something original in a busy – and competitive (lol, irony) – market.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BgCSEBNgTw-

Good Idea 5: Sticks to the rules

Yes, this is an obvious one, but there are a few funny kinks in the Facebook and Instagram competition Ts and Cs. For example, Do you know which platform prohibits tags and shares as entries? If not, you may want to check them out here and here.

So there you have it a solid five out of five in the criteria we made up solely for this blog post. Great work Glassons. So great, in fact, that Mosh co-founder Jon Randles sums up the campaign when he says, “It’s a short, sweet, easy campaign. It doesn’t have any flaws – it achieves what it’s been designed to achieve.”

He says the only potential limitation is the competition is over in a minute – but of course, that is the point. Going forward, it will be interesting to see how the competition performed with the non-chronological news feed algorithms – or is this just a tactic to test the ‘rithms? Wouldn’t put it past these savvy social marketers. Speaking of savvy social media marketing, what other inventive, creative or successful examples of this have you seen lately?

Let us know in the comments, and we will examine them in further blog posts.