Three Mobile has everyone talking about #Holidayspam.

Three Mobile launched a new service allowing their customers to use their phones abroad for free. 

For many Brits travelling to Europe, as you could imagine, this was a big deal. So of course the brief was to celebrate this offer as a good thing. But is it?

The human behaviour of humble bragging on social media while travelling was already rampant. So imagine your social feed when roaming fees and restrictions were lifted! Three Mobile wasn’t doing the world a service, they were going to start an epidemic. A tsunami of beach pics, sunsets, cocktails, airplane wings and hot dog legs were about to take over social media.

We broke the campaign into three phases:

Create the problem: This meant doing what we were originally asked to do, advertise the new service with great enthusiasm and naivety.

Apologize for it: Like most corporate PR catastrophes, we took complete responsibility for the epidemic on live television.

The Clean Up: this gave us an online behaviour to be active on social media as we desperately urged consumers to brag responsibly. It worked, at least for views, but it failed to really stop anyone from posting. If anything it made matters worse. And that was the point. 

The idea was a huge success and became one of the most effective and talked about campaigns in Three Mobile history. It became WARC’s social campaign of the year, won at D&AD, became a permanent phrase in culture, and became an enduring platform for many years to come.