Member Article

Yorkshire PR firm to speak at RWE conference after YouTube hit

Yorkshire PR agency Cream Consultancy has been invited to speak at a European conference on social media after creating a tongue-in-cheek YouTube video.

Cream’s director Elizabeth Hudson scripted the video as part of a social media campaign for client UK Water Features.

It wanted to fight back after Ikea launched its “Say No to Gnomes” TV adverts earlier this year.

UK Water Features and Cream took action after the Ikea ads showed gnomes being blown-up and “smashed to smithereens”.

Cream launched its own campaign featuring UK Water Feature’s mascot gnome Walter Bucket.

Elizabeth scripted a YouTube video titled Yes2Gnomes, where the gnomes fight back by threatening to chainsaw through a bookcase.

Sheffield-based Sixty Second Video filmed the video and there was a Walter blog. Elizabeth also created a twitter account @walterbucket – a tweet about the video was re-tweeted by magician Paul Daniels to his 52,602 followers.

The campaign gathered speed when Chelsea Flower Show overturned a long-standing ban on gnomes and allowed them back into its grounds in 2013.

The You Tube video attracted 2,690 hits and went as far afield as Europe – where it was spotted by the corporate communication team at RWE, Germany’s biggest electricity producer and parent company to npower.

As a result, Elizabeth has been invited to speak to an RWE social media conference in Essen, Germany, on Thursday, November 7.

Around 70 colleagues from the RWE group, from the UK, Netherlands and Eastern Europe, will discuss the year’s best campaigns.

Elizabeth said: “The campaign showed that social media can reach thousands of people on a very small budget.

“A Barnsley company was able to take on international giant Ikea through YouTube, twitter and blogging, something which would have been unthinkable without the might of social media.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Mark Lane .