Successful Twitter campaign with Med-Lemon Muscle Man

"We realised that to target the people most relevant to the brand - those in need of a flu remedy - the classical way of looking at target audiences didn't really apply," says Johann Schwella, Digital Creative Director at 140 BBDO. "There's no age bracket, no gender bias or LSM category that can predict who is sick."

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Construction of the campaign

Using listening tools, the team scoured Twitter and categorised all tweets from South Africa that mentioned flu, being sick or anything remotely phlegm related. They then laid out a battle plan for picking out the most entertaining tweets and decided to respond to them and, with that, @MedlemonSA was born.

The construction of the campaign came from the simple insight that people do not want to interact with generic content, especially not in a dull category, but everyone cares about a brand that takes the time to care specifically about them. Therefore, the solution was simple. Let us do what the brand promises - make people feel better through a live response campaign that caters for flu sufferers that need a 'pick me up'.

Critical to the project was creating a voice for the Med-Lemon Muscle Man. Dylan Ferguson, Senior Strategic Planner at 140 BBDO says, "We wanted to use the Muscle Man as the vehicle for engagement, so we injected some character into the familiar Muscle Man, personifying the icon to be a witty, light-hearted mood lifter."

If one dives deeper into the @MedlemonSA account, in just over a month, the campaign has interacted with football clubs, celebrities, created music, seen rocket cats, made the disgusting sounds of illness more palatable and given sexy voices to those poor people who have lost their own.