In October 2022, Spirit’s costume meme started popping up across social media feeds, first gradually, then massively. Subsequently receiving plenty of media coverage from everyone from Kevin Hart, Jimmy Fallon, Try Guys, and about every sports team you can name. This viral moment provided numerous opportunities for Spirit to capitalize on the attention and significantly increase brand awareness leading up to Halloween.
Our team adjusted our organic, paid, and long-form content to maximize the opportunity and generate efficient impressions & engagement, drive conversation, and leverage the many forms of UGC that were circulating throughout social media.
Our strategy was largely focused on a Twitter Trend Takeover dubbed, #SpiritHallowMeme. We decided to embrace the moment and lean into not just the costume meme, but also the fact that Spirit Halloween is a “meme-able” brand.
As part of the campaign, we encouraged fans to create their own costume meme, had fun with the sheer amount of memes being shared, embraced “classic” Spirit memes and interacted with brands and celebrities.
Prior to the October 29th Twitter Trend Takeover, we monitored the increasing virality, and after letting it build up over a few days, Spirit Halloween acknowledged the moment with our version of the meme on October 26th. Ultimately being recognized as one of BuzzFeed’s “most defining memes of 2022.” Additionally, we published our own round-up of the costume memes on the Spirit Halloween blog – resulting in one of the most trafficked blog posts of the season.
One of the challenges our team came across was quickly pivoting the execution of the Twitter Takeover campaign to better capitalize on the meme and ensure that our activation was in-line with the conversation surrounding the brand at that moment. We felt great about the creative execution of the campaign and its tie-in to the social media trend
As a result, year-over-year brand mentions more than quadrupled during the month of October and the paid Twitter Trend Takeover was over 100% more engaging than 2021’s activation.
Additionally, the virality of the meme allowed Spirit Halloween to garner over a 130% increase in media impressions compared to 2021.
We consider our efforts to be a success in part because the Twitter campaign was significantly more efficient and impactful compared to the prior year. It’s our theory that the campaign’s relevancy and timeliness were big catalysts to this success.
