• by Sean Hargrave , Staff Writer, April 29, 2014

Sometimes it's good to find out that what you thought you knew about marketing strategy is actually right -- like not all well-spoken people are clever. It's particularly true of Twitter. There will be an element of adland people wondering why it took Domino's to partner with Adaptly to find out that pizza, Twitter and television go together. After all, Domino's sponsored The Simpsons for a decade, until recently. 

There will also be an element of people turning around and saying that it's self-evident that humour, particularly well-timed and apt, gets strong engagement and pictures create an appeal that's stronger than words alone. Hence, if you get some humour, include it in a picture with an apt tag line and associate it with a big show, it would almost seem obvious you have the recipe for Twitter success.

However, sometimes the obvious elements need to be proven -- and more importantly, measured and reported on.
That's exactly what Domino's latest campaign results show. Through creating #BigNightIn it managed to hit a peak engagement rate above 20% and a campaign-wide rise in engagement with picture-supported, promoted tweets from 1% to 15%. Crucially, cost per engagement was a lowly 20p and three million impressions led to 24,000 brand name mentions.
The key to the successful campaign, Twitter maintains, is following three simple rules. Create a unique hashtag, support it with entertaining rich media and then promote it to a relevant audience. Domino's knew that it needed to appeal to users who were interested in top early-evening celebrity-based shows and football, particularly the late Saturday kickoff, and so reached out to those users. With "I'm A Celebrity," "Strictly Come Dancing" and "The X Factor" fans targeted, through the use of hashtags, response to humorous pictures and chatty #BigNightIn tagged conversations proved to be positive.

It may prove something you would expect to be self-evident, but that's not a bad thing in itself. Twitter's second-screeners really did turn out to be the perfect audience for Domino's to reach out to. 

Of course, the elephant in the room here is that is shows how a savvy brand can use Twitter to tap into a television show's audience without the huge expense of sponsoring a show or advertising during a break.

Now, that really is going to be a trend worth watching.