/UNIQLO_Pinstorming

To increase awareness for their brand new Dry Mesh collection in the western world, UNIQLO wanted an online campaign of high impact and low budget. The briefing we were given didn't have lots of constraints, but using Pinterest was one of the main requests.

Our suggestion was to create a series of very high images and post them in rapid succession on Pinterest, essentially taking over the image feed with Pinterest billboard-like images.

What followed was an intense period of research, not only to find out what was the highest image height (or smallest aspect ratio) allowed by the site, but also to figure the anti-spam mechanisms employed in the public category feeds.

We had many doubts at the beginning of the project. The feasibility of the whole concept was still an open question, and the plan was at constant risk of being called off. However, after about two weeks of tests, with more than a hundred accounts created and spreadsheets full of tests results, we knew it was possible and how to achieve it.

Doing automated posts was out of the question due to the way Pinterest's session login worked. Instead, with the enlisted the help of several people from Firstborn. Using an internal HTML site assembled especially to help with the post process, we were able to coordinate "Pinstorming" sessions, where each person of our group would perform a series of clicks to pin images to a specific category at the same time.

The process worked fantastically. We were able to storm all our target categories, including the most popular ones (like Fashion). For a fleeting moment, visitors to those categories would see the page taken over by UNIQLO's creative vertical billboards. And more than being simply spammy, the billboards were unique and fun; our hope was that Pinterest users would be caught by surprise rather than being annoyed. And responses to the campaign seem to have shown exactly that.

On a personal level, this project was a great learning experience. For one thing, because it showed that perseverance sometimes pay off, and sometimes it's too early to give up just because you don't know whether something will work or not. And for another, it also showed that some time efficacy in tech is not about creating something in a given programming language, but also some lateral thinking in how to solve uncommon problems.