Gas-X® is an over-the-counter medicine from GSK that offers fast, effective relief from pressure, bloating or discomfort commonly referred to as gas. Its chief ingredient for success is its comic brand personality. Gas lends itself easily to be the butt of all jokes.
As a brand built on humor, Gas-X launched its Works of Fart social media campaign, which consisted of a series of Twitter posts altering classic works of art to put the subjects in unfortunate (read: gassy) social situations. No piece of art was safe from being lampooned!
Our key objective for this campaign was to increase brand awareness by engaging our social audience through humorous and unexpected creative.
We aimed develop thumb-stopping visuals that captured people's attention in-feed. So we "rescued" some classic paintings from the public domain, and showed just how awkward things might be if they were a little...gassier. Because embarrassing conditions are easier to talk about with a laugh.
Then we looked for opportunities to incorporate topicality (even with classic works of art still being our area of focus) since we didn't have much media spend to throw behind our ads. So the question became: how could we authentically insert ourselves into the pop culture conversation to give people a whiff of our campaign?
The answer? Gas-X would go to Broadway. We launched our first ad timed with the 2017 revival of the musical "Sunday in the Park with George," starring Jake Gyllenhaal.
This first post featured the famous pointillist painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte by artist Georges-Pierre Seurat, and had been performing well based on standard metrics for about a week since it went live.
However, above and beyond the retweets and likes, the post was noticed by the cast of the Broadway musical Sunday in the Park With George, which stars Jake Gyllenhaal and is based on the life of Seurat. In response to viewing the tweet – and without any brand contact or partnership – the cast recreated our tweet live on stage, in full Broadway costume and makeup! They recorded, added sound effects, and shared this video on their Twitter accounts.
This organic moonshot drove HUGE results, pulling our engagement metrics up a massive 10.31% compared to DH benchmarks.