How do you get people talking about how great you are in a crisis?

The brief was simple yet fiendishly difficult: "make Direct Line contemporary, culturally relevant and engaging for Middle England."

Focusing on the fact the brand is good in crisis, we developed an idea that looked at the ultimate British response to bad news: putting the kettle on!

Keeping it light, we dubbed everyday crises “tea-mergencies” and – together with City University – scientifically proved that tea really does calm Brits down. We then worked with a master blender to create the ultimate blend of calming tea.

Next we seeded the term ‘tea-mergency’ on Twitter, aggregating use of the word and any reference to tea on a branded site Tea-mergency.com. Anyone suffering a tea-mergency received our special tea.

Within the first week alone, more than 1,000 Tweets appeared using the #tea-mergency tag with tweet reach of 2 million. Our news story spawned a series of double-page spreads, appearing in five national newspapers with an OTS of 281,000,000. The Times went so far as to send us pictures of the team enjoying a nice cup of our tea under the ‘tea-mergency’ poster that the tea arrived in.

Coverage meant that we were able to generate extensive interest from day one, which we built upon through Twitter activity, giving us a platform to engage directly with consumers in a brand new way. This gave the brand cultural relevance (tick), and made it both contemporary and engaging (tick, tick). Objectives achieved!