Social Media Campaign 3 | SunMatrix Ramble

Arkaden: Fashion Photo Project

A shopping mall launches its fall campaign by doing something most brands still struggle to do. It hands the camera to customers and lets them create the hero image, the lead campaign visual.

Arkaden is a shopping mall in the centre of Gothenburg, Sweden. To increase their digital presence and to engage with their customers, they developed an online action based on the insight that their target audience loves to take pictures and create their own content.

So the team at Arkaden decided to let go of the controls and let their customers shoot the fall campaign. One lucky winner was selected for her picture, which was then published in newspapers and outdoor ads.

Why “let customers shoot it” is a smart digital presence play

The mechanism does two jobs at once. It generates content at scale, and it gives the audience a reason to come back, vote, and recruit friends. The brand does not just post a campaign. It hosts a competition that produces the campaign. Because entries need votes, participants recruit friends, which is why the campaign can spread without heavy incentive spend. This is worth copying when you need both engagement and usable campaign assets, not just attention.

Extractable takeaway: Make user-generated content the asset pipeline. Give it a simple submission rule, a public selection moment, and a real-world outcome so participation produces both content and distribution.

In European retail and shopping-centre marketing, campaigns that convert everyday behaviour, taking photos and sharing them, into a branded mechanic, a simple repeatable action loop, tend to earn participation without heavy incentive spend.

What Arkaden is really buying

This is permission to show up in feeds as people. Instead of broadcasting “our fall look”, Arkaden lets customers say “my photo could be the fall look”, which is a stronger motivation to share.

The real question is whether you are willing to run customer-made work as the public face of the campaign.

Writing about this project also reminded me of the online photo casting done by Playboy Magazine in March 2010. Check that out here.

Mechanics to borrow from Arkaden’s photo contest

Turn creation into a clear outcome. The prize is not just a gift. It is publication and visibility.
Build a vote loop, a repeat-visit cycle. Voting creates repeat visits and social recruiting.
Make the rules instantly understandable. Shoot, submit, vote, win.
Carry the winner into paid media. The offline exposure is what makes the participation feel “real”.

A few fast answers before you act

What is Arkaden’s Fashion Photo Project?

An online activation where customers shoot the fall campaign fashion photo, then a winner is selected and the winning image runs in traditional media.

Why is this stronger than asking people to “share a photo”?

Because the photo has a job. It can become the campaign. That raises effort, pride, and the willingness to recruit votes.

What is the key growth mechanic in campaigns like this?

Voting. Voting creates repeat traffic and turns participants into promoters because they want friends to support their entry.

What is the main brand benefit?

Earned distribution and fresh content, plus a public signal that the brand trusts its customers and participates in their culture of making and sharing.

What is the biggest execution risk?

If the submission and voting flow feels complicated, participation collapses. The experience has to be fast, obvious, and mobile-friendly.

Viajes Galeón: Twitpoker

A poker table. Five of Colombia’s best-known Twitter personalities. Except the chips are not money. They are followers.

Viajes Galeón, a Colombian travel agency, and Y&R Colombia create Twitpoker, a poker game where players bet their Twitter followers instead of cash. The match is streamed live to audiences via web cams, pulling spectators into the tension of every hand because every raise has a visible social cost.

As described, the live format scaled beyond the five invited players. More than 27,000 people played together on a single table experience, and a brand with little or no prior social footprint used the stunt to kick-start its Twitter presence.

Followers as currency

The mechanism is a value swap. Twitter followers become the stake, which instantly reframes poker from private risk to public reputation. Every decision is legible to the audience and personally meaningful to the players, because the loss is social proof, not cash.

In social-led brand building, the most persuasive “launch” is a mechanic that makes your audience feel they are participating in the growth, not merely watching an ad about it.

Why it lands

The idea works because it turns a platform metric into a story engine. Most follower counts sit idle as vanity. Twitpoker makes the number consequential, and consequence creates attention. The live stream adds immediacy, and the five invited players supply recognizable personalities, so the audience is watching real identities collide with real incentives.

Extractable takeaway: If you want social growth fast, design a mechanic where the platform’s native currency is genuinely at stake, then stage it live so spectators feel the outcome unfolding in real time.

What the travel brand is really buying

The real question is how a low-awareness travel brand gives people a reason to follow right now.

Viajes Galeón is not buying “engagement” as a buzzword. It is buying a credible reason for people to follow, talk, and keep watching. The campaign converts a travel agency into a social event host, which is a stronger role for a brand with low awareness than trying to shout offers into a quiet feed.

What to steal from Twitpoker

Make the platform metric matter. Treat followers, likes, time, or access as something that can be risked or earned.
Use live to create urgency. Live formats compress attention and increase sharing because people do not want to miss the outcome.
Cast with credibility. Recognizable participants provide narrative without needing heavy scripting.
Let the audience feel included. Scale participation beyond the core cast so it becomes a shared event, not a private stunt.

A few fast answers before you act

What is Twitpoker?

A live-streamed poker game where participants bet their Twitter followers instead of money, built to generate attention and grow a brand’s social presence.

Why does “betting followers” work as a mechanic?

Because it converts a familiar social metric into a real stake, making every play emotionally legible and socially consequential.

What role does the live stream play?

It creates immediacy and shared tension, which increases participation, sharing, and real-time commentary.

What is the key requirement for this to feel credible?

The stakes must be real and visible, and the participants need an audience that cares about their reputations.

When should a brand use a stunt like this?

When the goal is to bootstrap social attention quickly, and when you can translate platform-native value into a simple game with a clear win and loss.

smart Argentina: The Tweet Commercial

Argentina continues to set the standard in creative Twitter campaigns. In this latest execution, when you visit smart’s official account for Argentina, you might think some kid got in there and had his way with the keyboard. In reality, the feed is built from carefully crafted ASCII art tweets (images built from text characters) that stack into an animated sequence.

A Twitter timeline that behaves like a commercial

The mechanic is simple and slightly mischievous. The smart Argentina team publishes hundreds of ASCII frames as consecutive tweets, then relies on Twitter’s keyboard navigation to “play” them quickly. The result is billed as a Twitter-based animated commercial built from the timeline itself.

In consumer brand social media marketing, repurposing native interface behavior into a brand experience is one of the fastest ways to earn attention without buying more media.

How to watch it the intended way

Visit the smart Argentina twitter account and hold down the “J” key to move rapidly through the tweets and see the flipbook effect. Alternatively, the video below captures the idea as it was meant to be experienced.

Why this works, even though it is “just tweets”

It treats a constraint as a canvas. The 140-character format becomes the production rule, and the feed becomes the screen. That restraint is also the brand fit. A small car brand using a small-message platform to create a big-format effect is a neat piece of coherence. Because the viewer has to actively scroll to make it move, the act of watching feels like participation, which makes the trick easier to remember and repeat. The real question is whether you can make a platform’s native navigation feel like a viewing ritual, not a gimmick.

Extractable takeaway: If the interface can become the playback engine, you can turn a feed into a format, and a format into shareable proof of craft.

Steal the timeline-as-commercial pattern

Build the ad out of the platform. If the medium is the message, people are more likely to show others how it works.
Exploit one native behavior. Here, a single shortcut becomes the playback engine.
Make the payoff legible in seconds. The moment the animation “clicks”, the story tells itself.
Let craft signal effort. Hundreds of frames reads as obsession, and obsession reads as share-worthy.

A few fast answers before you act

What is “The Tweet Commercial” in one line?

A flipbook-style animation made from hundreds of ASCII tweets, designed to “play” as you move through smart Argentina’s Twitter timeline.

What role does the “J” key play?

It uses Twitter’s keyboard navigation to advance quickly through tweets, effectively turning the timeline into a fast-scrolling animation reel.

Why is the “world’s first” claim risky to repeat as fact?

Because “first ever” is hard to prove across a platform’s full history. It is safer to treat it as how the work was billed at the time.

What is the transferable lesson for brand teams?

If your platform is saturated with conventional posts, build a sequence that only makes sense in the native interface. The novelty becomes the distribution.

What is the main execution risk if platform behavior changes?

If keyboard shortcuts or timeline behavior change, the “playback” may break. Treat the navigation trick as a bonus, and make sure the idea still holds up when captured as video.