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Nike and RED came to us in october of 2009 with the hope of finding some way to use Twitter to raise awareness about the upcoming World AIDS Day. There wasn’t much detail aside from the early abstract vision: somehow, we needed to turn Twitter red for a day. Nike and RED wanted to use this campaign to raise AIDS awareness, and to help introduce an interesting new product: Special (Nike)RED laces, from which 100% of all profits would to go to AIDS relief in Africa.
We held multiple strategy sessions with Nike and RED to drum up ideas for what it would mean to turn Twitter red. We came up with dozens of ideas, but the most compelling of all of them went way beyond a simple banner or text tout; we wanted to turn people’s tweets red with a hashtag, meaning that anyone who included #RED in their tweets—for one day only—would have those tweets display as bright red everywhere on the site; something that had never been done before on Twitter.
To be honest, we had our doubts that Twitter would be comfortable with such a drastic measure; however they loved the idea and proceeded to execute it beautifully. They also executed various other ideas partly based on concept mockups we developed (unfortunately we’re not allowed to show you our mockups), such as a RED themed homepage and an AIDS awareness-centric twitter background.
On December 1st, 2009 we saw many of our ideas come to life in a campaign that was extremely successful in raising awareness and money for AIDS in Africa; It was humbling to be part of such a great endeavor.