Food Capitals of Instagram

534	Pieces of Coverage
1,466	Tweets
4,711	Facebook Engagements

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This felt like cheating

The client offers the ability for digital natives to print off their photos to create picture books, desk ornaments and other mementos. They passionately believe your photos (and memories) deserve to live somewhere other than your phone.

With this in mind, we set out to see what people were using their phones to take photographs of, and what was most popular at the time.

It was around the time that Instagram was really taking off. We’re not just talking about what was popular within the platform, but the rise of the platform itself was gaining lots of media attention.

People who weren’t on the platform were curious to know, what is this thing? And what are people doing with it?

Within the platform itself, the food p*rn craze (and hashtag) was starting to explode.

So we had a hot social platform, food, hashtags, photos, then added a pinch of interactive data visualisation, colourful bubbles, maps and a slice of bacon.

It was such a simple recipe, it almost felt like cheating.

So many hot topics, all overlapping, folded into one campaign.

And what does that give you?

The Food Capitals of Instagram.

In truth, this idea felt a little too easy. And we almost overlooked it for that reason. But what a mistake that would have been.

There are two questions I’m frequently asked:

Which idea did you think would do really well and didn’t?

And which idea did even better than you expected?

This one is definitely the latter.

We expected it to do well, but we didn’t expect it do to THAT well. It got close to the most top tier coverage of any campaign I’ve ever been involved in – for a piece about street food on Instagram!

We weren’t the first to use Instagram hashtags as a data source – I believe that claim to fame belongs to the creators of The Selfiest Cities. But we may have been the second.

The format was then rinsed and repeated by so many agencies and brands, that we actually started to see tweets from journalists pleading for it to stop.

There can be a lot of value in catching a wave early. And also knowing when to get off.