Lord Sugar — Live
Pan MacMillan challenged Guided to launch Lord Sugar’s new book – The Way I See It: Rants, Revelations & Rules for Life.
We had to position it as a new release, not a 2nd autobiography (after the previous year’s successful What You See Is What You Get autobiography). It was important to achieve considerable cut through on a small budget, building momentum towards the crucial Christmas sales period and make enough noise to stand out from the spate of books launched by other celebrities around the same time (Super Thursday).
Initially Pan MacMillan wanted a traditional print campaign (and Guided obliged – across posters and taxi wraps) – but we realised there was a better, more effective approach…
Lord Sugar is a Twitter addict who at the time had 1m+ followers (he’s also big on Facebook and Youtube). He is a media channel in his own right – the most effective channel to reach the most likely people to buy his new book – his fans. He’s also a very busy guy – so a solution that revolved around him, but was easy for him to take part in would be win-win.
The world’s first live Twitter book signing was born.
It took place in his office (cunningly on the Wed before Super Thursday). The day before the signing, he invited his Twitter followers to tweet rants at him… the ones that struck a chord would reward their tweeter with a signed copy of the book – all broadcast live via Livestream so that winners could see him sign their book live. Their book arrived in the post a day later; a link to a clip of their book being signed sent to them to share with friends on social media.
The results were incredible:
- #TheWayISeeIt – trending globally at position 1 on Twitter for over 20hrs
- 390k Tweets
- 7.6m OTS from tweets
- 100k live viewers over 30 mins
- Celebrity Tweeters to comment / get involved included Rio Ferdinand, Chris Moyles, Piers Morgan, Robbie Savage, Alastair Campbell, Peter Jones…
- 8000 increase in Lord Sugar’s Twitter followers.
- Content for Lord Sugar’s Facebook and Youtube channels
- Mainstream press coverage.
This innovative launch won a Guardian MEGA Digital Innovation Award for Campaign of the year.
