• Brand T-Mobile
• Project Dance
• Services Social media advertising and digital outreach
• Date 16 January 2009
• Headline 18m+ plays drive extraordinary WOM and contribute to 22% sales uplift

Background: Dance

T-Mobile’s riff on Frozen Grand Central, a spectacular 2½ minute film in which 350 choreographed dancers disrupted and confounded commuters at London's Liverpool Street station, first aired during Celebrity Big Brother on a Friday night in mid-January, just 24 hours after the Improv-Everywhere-inspired event.

Challenge: support cross media activity

In the words of Richard Huntingdon, the Saatchi planner behind T-Mobile's ambitious 'Life's For Sharing' strategy, this campaign was "depth-charged with bought media": TV, outdoor, digital outdoor, radio, online. But although the film was rushed out within hours of the disturbance, creative for most media channels was not available until the end of the following week due to production constraints. Consequently, MediaCom asked Unruly to compensate for this potentially quiet period by making the film ubiquitous online.

Solution: flash mob fans and Facebook

Unruly Media quickly got the film out to flash mob fans, who had been carefully identified and qualified over the previous week. Hundreds of bloggers embedded the clip, which clocked up 1m views on YouTube over the first weekend. On Monday morning, Unruly Media took over popular video sharing applications within Facebook to make the video as easy as possible to re-discover and as frictionless as possible to forward on to friends and colleagues during the week-long hiatus before online creative became available.

Results: genuine word of mouth phenomenon

• 18,572,973 plays
• 20,649 comments
• #1 on Viral Video Chart
• 22% sales uplift

The clip spread like wildfire: for every person viewing the video, it was, during first-level pass-on, forwarded to an average of 3.6 people, leading to 1.8m forwards within Facebook alone. More than 50 T-Mobile Dance groups formed on Facebook, often to organise similar events at UK rail stations.

Dance topped Unruly Media's Viral Video Chart and stayed in the top 5 for over 2 weeks, holding even Obama’s inauguration speech at bay. By July 2009, the video had amassed over 16m views, elicited 16,000 comments, and become the 46th most viewed video on YouTube of all time. A copy-cat event at Antwerp station, itself generating over 4m views, cemented T-Mobile’s place in the train-station-flash-mob meme.

T-Mobile’s YouTube channel was, during the second quarter of 2009, the most viewed commercial channel in the UK, and the second most viewed globally. And store footfall in January was the highest ever for T-Mobile, with handset sales increasing by 22% during launch week.

"This new media strategy represented a brave move for us and was a resounding success. Not only did we capture the imagination of the nation but we also delivered for the business."

Lysa Hardy, Head of Brand and Communications, T-Mobile UK

Aside: what drives pass-on?

Dance demonstrates a nuanced and sophisticated appreciation of the types of content that people want to share and the motivations driving them. Eschewing overused viral triggers such as sex, shock, and humour, Dance taps into people's propensity to feel touched, inspired and uplifted. Perhaps appropriately for The Lovemarks Company, 'love' and 'like' were the two most frequently used words in comments about the film. (The top 100 words are presented in a weighted list below).

It's no coincidence that dance recurs as a motif through many viral video successes. The Hamster Dance, Where the Hell is Matt?, Evolution of Dance, CPDRC Inmates' Thriller Tribute. All attest that the socially infectious dimension of dance transmits well through video. T-Mobile's Dance harnesses this power and, like many other successful dance virals, adds visual spectacle through careful choreography to heighten the impact.

So far, so good. What's great is the way in which Saatchi's event doesn't try to start from scratch or, like a defensive teenager, pretend to have no influences. As a very clear response to Improv Everywhere's Frozen Grand Central, Dance also participates within a greater online conversation and helps to perpetuate if not co-create a successful, virulent meme.

It's true, too, that Dance's unfettered, expansive optimism captured a certain aspect of the zeitgeist in late 2008 / early 2009. With Obama-mania sweeping much of the English-speaking world, itself either part-cause or part-consequence of a mood-swing away from the vicious cynicism manifested in much of 2007's pop culture, the financial crisis and ensuing credit crunch created suprising updraughts of reckless, Depression-era good humour. The world's gone to shit. We might as well party. Smart brand stewards were on hand to help organise them.

Agency credits

• Creative: Saatchi & Saatchi
• Media: MediaCom
• Seeding: Unruly Media