HONCHO

Honcho PR Campaign

Key stats:

  • Two Campaigns
  • 100+ links
  • Highest domain rating: 86

Business challenge

With Christmas nearing, we decided to have a little fun and run a digital PR campaign to show off the skills and abilities of our PR team. The biggest challenge was to create ideas that could cut through all the PR and marketing that is amplified around this season.

During an ideation session, the team came up with various themes and ideas around Christmas which we knew would get people talking. To determine the best ideas the DPR consulted with our in-house Strategy & Insights Analyst, to determine which idea would generate the best data and overall campaign.

As a team, we decided to create two campaigns.

Campaign one:
Christmas Films; Which Christmas films are the most stressful to watch

Campaign two:
Christmas Adverts; The most popular Christmas adverts

How we got the data

We wanted to analyse the script of some of our favourite and best rated Christmas movies to see how stressed or relaxed they are to watch.

In order to do this, we first used a list of the top 50 rated Christmas movies seeded from Rotten Tomatoes and then found PDF versions of their scripts. We then created a script that would read the PDF file, turn it into strings of text, and then split it into sections of 2000 characters. We had to split the script into sections because we would then turn these text chunks into URLs to run through a stress/relaxation calculator tool called TensiStrength.

TensiStrength determines the strength of stress and relaxation in the language used throughout the films. TensiStrength estimates the strength of stress and relaxation expressed in short texts – including informal language. It has a human-level accuracy which gives a fair judgement to small texts. The scoring reports 2 strengths; -1 (no stress) to -5 (very high stress) and 1 (no relaxation) to 5 (highly relaxed).

The TensiStrength URLs we created will then be crawled by the script, and then extract the relaxation and stress scores from the webpage. This was run across all of the script PDFs and once exported, we were able to analyse which movies were the most stressed or relaxed according to their average scores from the scripts.

We also used TensiStrength to collect data for the Christmas advert campaign where we scraped tweets using the campaign hashtag for each Christmas advert and ran them through TensiStrength to determine the strength of stress and relaxation viewers felt watching each one enabling us to determine the most well-received Christmas adverts for 2021.

The benefits of a data-based campaign

As journalists are focused on hitting their KPIs which are usually clicks, comments and shares, data-based campaigns appeal to mass audiences and are not restricted by location, which ultimately means it is more likely to be picked up across the country.

Who we reached out to

Knowing your audience is crucial and every great outreach pro knows not to send campaigns to all of your contacts. To learn more, here’s an article on prospecting and outreach.

Ella and Aneela from our outreach team analysed news platforms to see which adverts were making the most popular headlines or being reported on by consumer journalists, lifestyle journalists, and retail-based journalists, alongside making the most noise on socials.

So for example, Percy Pigmas had big names such as Dawn French and Tom Holland included, not to mention it was the first time Percy Pig was brought to life in history, so it was bound to make a splash.

With Boots, they touched on the sentimental aspect of Christmas, and Aldi’s advert featured an appearance from Marcus Rashford and poked fun at the M&S drama with the caterpillar cake, which caused a huge wave on social media earlier on in the year.

After finding a comprehensive list of prospective journalists, the team reached out and this proved to work effectively as we had over 90+ links due to syndicated coverage all across the UK.

Results

100+ links due to syndicated coverage all across the UK

A journalist for JPIMedia covered our article and featured our campaign in numerous JPI publications.

https://www.edinburghlive.co.uk/news/uk-world-news/most-popular-christmas-ads-2021-22375338

https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/national/uk-today/19761241.stressful-christmas-films-revealed-see-full-list/

https://www.bournemouthecho.co.uk/news/national/uk-today/19761241.stressful-christmas-films-revealed-see-full-list/