Flat Tire Event

You have to get very creative to capture someone’s attention when you are trying to sell tires –- or even talking about them. The main reason is that people really don’t care that much about tires, until they need them.

So for this social campaign we created a very simple event on Facebook – and told people, whatever you do, don’t come to this event. It’s an event that no sane person would ever want to go if they could help it, “Stranded with a Flat Tire in Rush Hour Traffic.” We even provided some tips on how to stay away and contact information that promoted Tire Pros’ road-side service and warranties.

It looks like any normal Facebook event.
But this is the first time an event was used as an advertisement hiding in plain sight. We thought people might get the joke or maybe we get a thumbs up or two, but we could not foresee how much engagement we would receive. It became an ongoing conversation that lasted over a month. And that conversation lead to 2,351 people being interested, 1,514 “going” to the event, 1800 thumbs up and over 500 comments.
And we did it all a month before the Area 51 raid. This was a great collaboration between Dana Boone, Margaret Bond and myself on the creative team.