The 2014 Super Bowl game took place just a few weeks prior to the premiere of the fourth season of Portlandia and like every brand, we wanted to find a way to break into the Super Bowl conversation. We did this by enlisting Portland's real feminist bookstore, In Other Words - the location where Portlandia's "Women & Women First" sketches are filmed - to live tweet the game from the Portlandia Twitter handle.
In Other Words' Super Bowl live tweets generated over 8,000 uses of the #FeministBookstoreSaysWhat hashtag, helped grow the Portlandia Twitter account from roughly 65,000 followers to 81,000 followers in just a few hours, a 25 percent hike, and helped us get fans excited for the new season of Portlandia - all in exchange for a $1,200 donation to In Other Words.
Our friends at In Other Words were able to hilariously channel the tone of Portlandia's beloved feminist bookstore characters, Toni and Candace, throughout the game and both Portlandia fans and the internet alike loved it, regardless of team allegiance. This stunt showed that simple, but strong executions of humor can really win big on social media. There were no bells, no whistles and no huge media campaign to help this stunt succeed. It was successful because it was a hilarious, natural extension of the show, paired perfectly with one of the biggest events of the year.
