In order to separate Buttercrane Shopping Centre from its competition at the most important times of the retail calendar, MAC PR conceived and delivered a unique Christmas campaign – to secure a Christmas themed Guinness World Record : World’s Largest Gathering of People Dressed as Snowman.
The campaign was over 12 month in planning. We opted for the self-certification option – which was onerous in terms of the stringent guidelines set out but was more cost effective approach. The Centre purchased Snowmen costumes – customised in order to fit Guinness’ strict criteria.
A range of sizes were purchased to enable family participation.
We launched the attempt in October with a PR campaign and professional images. We also embarked on an outreach campaign to local schools. We pre-registered participants and data capture was built in.
We staged our attempt on the night of the Santa Arrival, 17th November 2016, to augment an already successful Christmas event.
Each participant involved received a special certificate on return of their costume and all children received a specially commissioned snowmen chocolate lolly.
We were named official World Record Holders in January 2017, with a verified Guinness World Record of World’s Largest Gathering of People Dressed as Snowmen.
MAC PR achieved significant pre and post event publicity for our client Buttercrane, including the cover of Irish News, multiple UTV News packages, Q Radio coverage and significant local coverage. It generated £42,000 of offline PR coverage reaching 430,000+ people.
It reached 363K on social media channels during the weeklong campaign in the run up to the attempt.
Video content on the night reached over 185K with total views of 49.9K. Footfall was up + 60% on the previous year.
The Guinness World Record Attempt successfully propelled Buttercrane to the front of the local and national news agenda at a critical time for retailers.Buttercrane and its customers are now ‘Officially Amazing’ according to Guinness World Records! It was a hugely successful campaign, with an ROI of 320 %.
