Twitter agency to be launched on back of Mad Men success
LONDON - Carri Bugbee, the PR woman behind some of the much talked about twitter marketing of 'Mad Men', is to build a Twitter-based ad agency for media and entertainment companies.
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Bugbee, owner of Big Deal PR, was the face behind the Twitter account of 'Mad Men' character Peggy Olson, which helped create additional buzz for the critically acclaimed AMC series.
Bugbee won a Shorty Award (in reference to the 140 character maximum used by Twitter), which rewards the "best content producers on Twitter", last month for her tweets as Peggy Olson, who rose from being Don Draper's assistant to a copywriter in the Madison Avenue 1960-set drama.
She won in the advertising category despite undertaking the role as a fan rather than under any official 'Mad Men' capacity.
Bugbee now plans to build this success into an expansion of her 15-year-old PR business.
Last summer, when season two of 'Mad Men' was running on the AMC network, characters from the show started popping up on Twitter, filling people in on the details of their day.
Bugbee spotted Don Draper, ad executive and lead character, on Twitter and decided to start tweeting as Olson.
Don Draper Twitter account has attracted more than 7,092 followers and Peggy Olson has 12, 531, outstripping her boss.
Many fans mistakenly thought the Twitter characters were part of an AMC marketing push on behalf of the show's producers.
When lawyers at AMC found out what was happening they got Twitter to suspend the accounts of the characters believing there was a breach of copyright.
However, within a week, the accounts returned after the show's marketing team stepped in to persuade AMC it was foolish to stop free fan promotion.
After winning her Shorty Award, Bugbee said that there are a number of lessons producers and marketers can learn from the 'Mad Men' fan fiction, including that producers should strive to reserve the Twitter accounts for all the characters in whatever show or film they are making.
She also advised producers to overcome their need to control all aspects of their work and to use their fans to their advantage.
Mad Men's Peggy Olson: Twitter account attracted 12,000 followers
Tags
- Carri Bugbee |
- Twitter |
- Digital |
- Digital Media |
- Mad Men |
- Television |
- Entertainment |
- Marketing |
- Media
Comments
Neil Bradley - 08/04/2009
How original..... yet dull.
Roy Murphy - 08/04/2009
We're going to see more and more of this type of activity. for instance I'm already working on an advertising led pilot where the story starts on twitter and then filters out to other channels, with real and ficitional characters interacting, conversing and utlimately deciding on the outcomes.
Carri Bugbee - 09/04/2009
Roy, I can't wait to hear more about your pilot. Please keep me in the loop! I've been thinking that someone should do this for a long time. It's just one new direction for entertainment and I'm sure we'll see a lot more of it in a couple of years when the entertainment industry catches up with technology early adopters. To clarify the Ad Age piece, I never said that Supporting Characters would be a Twitter-only agency. I wouldn't want to build an agency based on a single technology platform or marketing channel. But Twitter is hot, so it sounds sexy. :-) @CarriBugbee AKA @PeggyOlson
Danish Bagadia - 15/04/2009
i would like to see if companies would buy into this proposition where they can hire social media expert to tweet for them in-house instead. There is an absolute buzz about twitter these days and may be this agency will benefit from acquiring some good clients to manage their profiles on twitter.