My friend Jacob is a content creator. Earlier this year I kindly arranged a two-week, nation-wide social activation behind his back.
Jacob has built a passionate fanbase of people who love to engage with his long-running social media challenges.
His Christmas 2024 advent calendar campaign was an enormous success, and so I decided (without his consent) that he should do something like that again.
In the spring of 2025 I assembled a team of absolutely world-class creative people in Chris Sawyer and Will Foster, and between us we cooked up a scheme:
Jacob’s most treasured possession, his sentimental cheese hoe, would be kidnapped; and we’d make him solve an elaborate escape room-style treasure hunt in order to get it back.
Unsurprisingly it was a lot of work to pull together, but the results were incredibly satisfying.
It was enormous fun to pull together, but as well as being a very rewarding experience it delivered some impressive numbers:
We racked up more than 5 million views over the course of the activation, and helped Jacob add another 28,000 followers across TikTok and Instagram.
It was also really incredible to see how the series sustained people’s interest over the course of almost two weeks.
As well as following the series religiously users really engaged with the content, helping to solve the clues and rescue the cheese hoe, in a way none of us had ever really seen before.
Happily, Jacob is now re-united with his most treasured possession, and the four of us are thinking about our next big creative project.