Chevrolet and Carat tasked several partners with creating epic real people surprises around the country on April 1 to make April Fool's 2015 the #BestDayEver. WhoSay's role would be to develop a celebrity influencer program (with less than two weeks to plan) with the following objectives and goals:
On April 1st 2015, the WhoSay team activated five celebrities (Ian Somerholder, Alec Baldwin, Nikki Reed, Norman Reedus and Olivia Wilde) to surprise students as their substitute teachers at colleges across the country. To do this, WhoSay leveraged their celebrity data to match the Chevrolet brand with celebrities that appealed to their key audiences. On the morning of Wednesday, April 1st during 9am college classes, the teachers told their students they wouldn't be able to teach that day. Then, a celebrity superstar entered the classroom as the substitute teacher!
Actress Olivia Wilde showed up at the Made In NY PA Training Program at the Brooklyn Navy to inspire aspiring production students in an intimate Q&A. Ian Somerhalder (The Vampire Diaries) and Nikki Reed (Twilight), who were recently engaged, surprised business students at Emory University to discuss the power of social media to induce positive worldwide change. Norman Reedus (The Walking Dead) schocked students at St. John's University to talk about television production and zombie apocolypses. And finally, Alec Baldwin showed up at Occidental College to teach a US history class.
WhoSay worked with the celebrities to develop their own creative twists on the campaign to make it authentic. For example, Alec Baldwin even dressed up as Abraham Lincoln, an idea he came up with himself, for his classroom surprise. Alec taught a class lecture on Civil Rights issues and constitutional rights. Then, he took off his hat and beard and revealed himself, surprising the entire class.
The WhoSay team then worked with the celebrities to capture these moments immediately and quickly produce video and social posts for each. Each celebrity took a selfie with the class and took to their social accounts to upload images and videos about the day using the hashtag #BestDayEver.
Content Delivered on April 1:
The campaign exceeded expectations and goals set out. In the first 24 hours the campaign was live, talent posts generated more than 1.5 million organic likes and shares alone. Classroom students actively engaged with the program and shared live content from the classroom to their own social accounts with the Chevrolet #BestDayEver hashtag.
These inspiring, shocking and hilarious moments also caught the attention of the media resulting in some major hits, generating 30 media stories.
